How Oil Companies Manipulate Journalists

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Excerpt from www.thenation.com

This piece was published in collaboration with Drilled Media, a multimedia reporting project focused on climate accountability.

“Kill the story.”

That’s what Alan Jeffers, a media relations manager at ExxonMobil, told the Houston bureau chief of Reuters in October 2016, about a year after InsideClimate News, the Los Angeles Times, and Columbia Journalism School began publishing reports revealing ExxonMobil’s decades-long campaign to deny climate science.

The Reuters bureau chief, Terry Wade, had forwarded Jeffers a press release from the Center for Media and Democracy about a filing the group made to the IRS alleging that the American Legislative Exchange Council was abusing its nonprofit status by lobbying for Exxon’s climate-denial policies. (Wade did not respond to requests for comment.)