CBS TURNS ITS AIRWAVES OVER TO ROCKEFELLER-FUNDED MEDIA TO ATTACK PLASTICS RECYCLING By KYLE KOHLI
ICN is funded by wealthy foundations that have spent hundreds of millions of dollars targeting the American energy industry through lawsuits and activist campaigns.
CBS TURNS ITS AIRWAVES OVER TO ROCKEFELLER-FUNDED MEDIA TO ATTACK PLASTICS RECYCLING
AUGUST 28, 2024 | KYLE KOHLI
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The decision by CBS News to partner with the activist “news” website Inside Climate News (ICN) for a story on plastic recycling should raise journalistic alarm bells, especially when readers are left without any information or anyacknowledgement about ICN’s funders and its mission to finance litigation and activism campaigns against American energy and industrial companies. Particularly troubling is the failure of this “partnership” to identify common funders between the authors of the story and cited sources.
In a story posted online on August 23, CBS News and ICN reported on plastic recycling in Houston, including an accompanying short-form documentary, but readers have little information on why ICN and CBS News have partnered for this piece:
“This story is a partnership between Inside Climate News and CBS News. Watch the CBS Reports documentary, ‘Advanced Recycling: Does Big Plastic’s Idea Work?’ in the video player above.”
That’s it. That’s the only context. At minimum, CBS News should have included the following important points of context for the readers’ benefit:
ICN is funded by wealthy foundations that have spent hundreds of millions of dollars targeting the American energy industry through lawsuits and activist campaigns.
A source in the story and ICN are funded by the same Rockefeller philanthropy.
In short, ICN is just another tool in the Rockefeller toolbox: it leverages relationships with outlets that would otherwise be considered “independent” to smuggle Rockefeller-approved narratives into mainstream discourse. The omission of these key facts and context raises serious questions about CBS News’ journalistic integrity.
With Climate Litigation Going Nowhere, Rockefeller Shifts Attacks Toward Plastics
After repeated failures in the climate litigation campaign, ICN has now turned CBS News to level attacks at energy companies over their plastics production and recycling businesses. The logic of attacking plastics and recycling to harm energy companies is made clear in a voiceover from CBS News journalist Ben Tracy during an accompanying short-form documentary:
“Plastic is made from oil, a fossil fuel. Exxon is one of the biggest oil and plastic producers on the planet.”
The statement is reductive and somewhat inaccurate—United States plastic production relies on ethane, which is primarily derived from natural gas—but it links plastics to the same “oil companies” ICN and the Rockefeller philanthropies have repeatedly attacked.
This media strategy relies on the same early tactics of the climate litigation campaign and turns what would be expected glaring omissions about ICN’s activist connections into plain journalistic malfeasance.
The CBS News and ICN story prominently features a report from Beyond Plastics, a group that has received at least $200,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF) since 2021. The close ties aren’t limited to funding. Judith Enck, the group’s executive director, worked behind the scenes with the Rockefeller Family Fund (RFF) in support of the Minnesota Attorney General’s climate lawsuit against oil companies.
The omission of RBF’s funding of ICN, which produced the story, and Beyond Plastics, which served as a key source in the story, is a disservice to readers and runs afoul of basic journalistic ethics.
When a self-proclaimed “news” outlet and a source both receive funding from the same entity – especially one with a clear stance on the issue at hand, like RBF – it becomes imperative to disclose this relationship. The failure of CBS News and ICN to do so is alarming.
This failure to disclose RBF’s funding of ICN is even more troubling since the story highlighted the California Attorney General’s investigation into oil companies’ plastics recycling efforts. The story is already being used as fodder by Rockefeller-funded groups to promote the California investigation: the Center for Climate Integrity, a group Rockefeller charities helped create that recruits plaintiffs for climate litigation against the fossil fuel industry, is heavily promoting this story.
Given the Rockefellers’ long history of using the media to gin up support for climate lawsuits, CBS News should disclose whether ICN’s financial sponsors at RBF are connected to the California investigation referenced in the story.
Rockefellers and ICN Follow a Familiar Playbook
ICN isn’t just funded by the Rockefeller philanthropies – it was a Rockefeller-backed project from the start. According to ICN’s website, Rockefeller Brothers Fund program director Michael Northrop “provided the seed grant that got ICN started in 2007,” and RBF remains a “core funder” to this day.
In addition, ICN’s founder and publisher David Sassoon previously served as a consultant to RBF and, as the New York Times reported, ICN is “an outgrowth of Mr. Sassoon’s consulting work for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a philanthropic group that emphasizes climate policy.”
RBF is an integral player in the network of foundations and activist groups that have manufactured the climate litigation campaign and funded the legal and activist efforts against American energy companies. The campaign began at the infamous 2012 La Jolla conference, where its legal, media, activist, and academic goals were mapped out. That conference was hosted by the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Climate Accountability Institute, two groups that receive funding from RBF.
In the fall of 2015, ICN published a series of stories that kicked off the #ExxonKnew campaign. This effort was followed a few weeks later by similar reporting from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and the Los Angeles Times. A year later, RBF and the Rockefeller Family Fund (RFF) admitted they directly funded the Columbia program with the explicit intention of publishing the #ExxonKnew series. The Rockefeller foundations and the reporting outlets came under heavy scrutiny for failing to provide adequate disclosures, with even the Columbia Journalism Review suggesting that the lack of disclosure could harm readers.
The reporting series was evidently funded and rolled out to tee up an attorney general investigation into the company. Within weeks of these reports’ publication, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced he had opened an investigation into ExxonMobil’s statements on climate change – a move that came after “private urging” from RFF director Lee Wasserman, as the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year:
“The journalism projects had been quietly funded by Rockefeller charities, which provided more than $500,000 for the efforts. Before the stories ran, Rockefeller Family Fund director Lee Wasserman privately urged the New York Attorney General to launch an investigation into Exxon.”
In the months that followed, attorneys general from Massachusetts and the U.S. Virgin Islands announced their own probes, and the campaign eventually ballooned into dozens of civil cases against energy companies filed across the country.
In 2019, with the litigation campaign arriving at a critical moment as the New York Attorney General’s case went to trial, ICN again showed its true colors by sending out a fundraising email where it touted its effort to attack energy companies and bragged that “the case is a direct result of work we published in 2015” and “provoked the New York Attorney General’s three-year investigation.”
That trial ended in a decisive defeat for the New York Attorney General’s office and now, nearly a decade since the original ICN series of stories, there has been little to show for these efforts. Still, ICN appears ready to deploy the same failed, unscrupulous tactics against recycling.
BOTTOM LINE: In the interest of transparency CBS News’s story must acknowledge ICN receives funding from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and disclose that ICN and Beyond Plastics are both funded by RBF. These glaring and continued omissions raise serious questions about the editorial standards employed prior to this story’s publication and cloud the perspectives of new consumers looking for unbiased information.
Misinformation harms all parties. Plastics improve product packaging and medical needs. Biased information may win a battle but can undermine much needed services for a quality life.