The winners of the 100th edition of the Pulitzer Prize awards were announced Monday. While the Rockefeller Family Fund-funded group InsideClimate News did not win the award, it was named a finalist for a series of reports alleging ExxonMobil hid knowledge of global warming from the public.
The revelation that InsideClimate News made the list as one of the media outlets deserving a Pulitzer Prize award comes on the heels of reports showing its donor, the Rockefeller Family Fund, colluded with several other economists to take down Exxon.
Environmentalists and representatives with RFF, the group bankrolling InsideClimate News, met at the group’s office building to discuss ways to have legal authorities target Exxon for fraud, among other charges, according to an April 13 report from the Wall Street Journal.
“A key meeting in the new push unfolded in January behind the closed doors of a Manhattan office building,” the WSJ reported Wednesday. “The session brought together about a dozen people, including Kenny Bruno, a veteran of environmental campaigns, and Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, two activists who helped lead the successful fight to block the Keystone XL pipeline.”
Those in attendance brainstormed ways “to establish in public’s mind that Exxon is a corrupt institution that has pushed humanity (and all creation) toward climate chaos and grave harm,” documents obtained by the WSJ show.
The Washington Free Beacon published reports shortly after showing the agenda and goals hashed out during the meeting — Bruno, a former member on the Greenpeace Board of Directors, aimed to delegitimize Exxon as political actors.
He has not been shy about displaying his distain for Exxon, tweeting on numerous occasions his desire to see the major oil producer knocked down several pegs.
The 2016 Pulitzer Prize awards ended up going to a who’s who of head honcho media outlets — news sources such as Associated Press, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and the Washington Post, were all awarded the prize for various reports on slavery in Southeast Asia, as well as gathering data to show every killing by a police officer in 2015.
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