David Koch, Jane Mayer, “A Word From Our Sponsor”, and PBS

This past week Jane Mayer released this article about David Koch. The article tries to portray David Koch has somehow having vast influence and power over the board of WNET. I read some article saying that Ms. Mayer was some type of authority on the Koch brothers. I took somewhat offensive to this as I have written 57 blog posts on the Koch family. To date I am probably the only blogger I have seen that actually has positive things to say about the Koch brothers.  Included in this was a historical net worth of the Koch brothers (1984-present) here, a three part series on the family (part 1, part 2, part 3), and a profile on wild brother Bill Koch here.

Koch in 2000 did have oil spills which lead to a $30 million fine according to this court document. Of course Koch Industries didn’t want to the oil spills as the loss of revenue from the oil spill along with the loss in value of the company (lower future sales because of the spill) would easily exceed $30 million.

Ms. Mayer makes some errors in her article. She refers to Koch Industries as a “huge energy-and-chemical conglomerate”. This is simply not true as Koch Industries as diversified even more over the years according to this article from the Wichita Eagle. Also she claims that the Koch brothers are trying to move the country to the right when David Koch has personally said he is in favor of legalize same sex marriage and I would suspect is more liberal on social issues than people believe (he did run on the Libertarian ticket). Another odd sentence Ms. Mayer states “When Koch joined the boards of WGBH and WNET, it seemed to mark an ideological inroad, enabling him to exert influence over a network with prominent news operation”. What concrete evidence does Mayer have that Koch was able to exert all this influence? According to a source Koch might have donated a seven figure to WNET (of course this is pure speculation). For sake of argument let’s say that Koch was going to make such a donation to WNET. Why would anyone with common sense donate to an organization that was about to release a film that basically denounces the donor?

When I first watched Park Avenue last year I was considering throwing the remote at the television. In the “Park Avenue” film it is stated that Mr. David Koch would leave his Park Avenue residence every weekend loading up his trucks and would never tip. However, for Christmas he would give a $50 check. I find this a little hard to believe because as clearly stated in the NewsMax article David Koch tips 15% which I covered here. This is of course after David Koch has given roughly $600 million to charities (arts, theatre, and medical research) as I mentioned here. The article also laments how public funding for PBS has decreased over the years. It is amazing that PBS is still publicly funded when people like David Koch and James Tisch give eight figure sum donations. I would be willing to bet the rent money PBS would not go out of business if the federal government stopped funding it. People realizing that the organization was not publicly funded would voluntarily contribute to help and support the organization. PBS is also not known to be fair or balanced. Richard Epstein had to school PBS reporter Paul Solman on why income inequality isn’t such as bad thing.

The article then tries to falsely convince readers that David Koch somehow had enormous power over the board of WNET when he was just one of 35 members. The article then goes on to talk about Citizen Koch and how producers of the film Tia Lessin and Carl Deal tried to pitch the idea to Independent Television Service (ITVS) (which is actually a group of independent filmmakers) said that the title of Citizen Koch would be a problem. Also ITVS stated that the documentary was not balanced and suggested certain changes be made. ITVS was funding Citizen Koch. At the end of the day ITVS (which to my knowledge David Koch is not associated with nor funds) did not fund Citizen Koch because the filmmakers Lessin and Deal didn’t want to conform to the changes. This is like if you are an artist and someone asks you to make changes to your painting and you refuse to do so. If you don’t make the changes you don’t get your funding.

Even the review magazine Variety said Citizen Koch had “too many plot strands”. IMDB reviews currently give it 5.6/10 which is pretty awful. The article tries to somehow link David Koch to Citizen Koch getting squashed which is pretty ridiculous. The implications of the article are that David Koch had so much power he was able to get Citizen Koch squashed even though it was ITVS who decided to pull funding for the documentary. David Koch was on the WNET board of trustees and was only one of 35 trustees. By definition this means that David Koch only held less than a 3% vote.

Assume David Koch has one vote. According to the WNET board of trustee website there are 35 board of trustees which would mean that David Koch only has less than 3% of the vote. David Koch decided to resign from WNET’s board of directors on May 16, 2013.