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Old News: MSNBC Struggles to Revive Failed #ExxonKnew Campaign

It’s been a long time since we have seen a news outlet prop up the failing #ExxonKnew campaign, but MSNBC did its best last night.

The segment, featured on “All in With Chris Hayes,” included commentary from the usual cast of anti-fossil fuel and anti-ExxonMobil activists: InsideClimate News reporter Neela Banjeree, and Harvard researchers Naomi Oreskes and Geoffrey Supran. It also regurgitated the same cherry-picked and biased information that activists have hurled on the social media accounts for years.

As a reminder, dozens of newspaper editorial boards and third-party experts have opined on the #ExxonKnew campaign, highlighting aspects that should make members of the public raise an eyebrow. For example, as a former state attorney general for Washington wrote last year, “it is becoming increasingly clear that Exxon has been unfairly maligned by a group of activists and lawyers driven by politics but bereft of facts.”

In an effort to fit the #ExxonKnew narrative into the “Climate in Crisis” reporting program to which MSNBC has been adhering, the network failed to acknowledge a simple truth about the campaign: after four years of investigation and countless hours spent pursuing failed lawsuits, the claims made by #ExxonKnew backers are simply untrue.

Read the rest of this post on EIDClimate.org.

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