Research Cited

Despite the reassurances from those close to the deal that the Kochs have no plans to use the media platform to proselytize, many of the liberal activists who closely track them remain suspicious. “There is zero chance that the Koch brothers are going to keep their hands off the content of these magazines,” Mary Bottari, the deputy director of the Center for Media and Democracy, a nonprofit that documents right-wing and corporate influence-buying, told me. “When they donated nearly three million dollars to Florida State University, they wrote a contract giving them control over hiring decisions in the economics department,” she said. (Donations were made between 2007 and 2015.) “The entire point of the purchase is to infuse the mainstream media with their extreme views.”

The Center for Media and Democracy’s PR Watch reported in 2015 that Eric O’Keefe, a longtime anti-government activist who is not related to James O’Keefe, gave Project Veritas a $50,000 donation in 2013. Though at the time he denied making the donation in a phone interview, the group somehow obtained a nonpublic Project Veritas tax document that documented the payment.

Meredith CEO Stephen Lacy calls the joining of the two magazine giants “a transformative and financially compelling growth opportunity.” Time CEO Rich Battista is expected to depart after the deal closes. Meredith says the investment vehicle owned by Charles and David Koch, prominent supporters of conservative causes, will not have a seat on the board and they will not influence editorial decisions. Mary Bottari of the Center for Media and Democracy, however, tells the Guardian that she believes the brothers want to create their own “media megaphone” to convince the public that they don’t need to worry about climate change and they should “forget about regulating the fossil fuel industry.”

Denouncing Meredith’s insistence that the Kochs won’t influence editorial content as “rubbish,” Robert Reich, a professor of public policy at UC Berkeley and former Secretary of Labor, speculated about the magazines’ futures in a Facebook post published Sunday:

The Koch Brothers don’t invest $650 million for nothing. My guess is they intend to use Time and its other publications—which reach millions of online and print readers—to promote their right-wing conservatism. The investment also gives them a way to combine their [cache] of voter information held by a data analytics company controlled by their network, i360, with the publishers’ consumer data.

Mary Bottari, deputy director of the Center for Media and Democracy, told the Guardian she thinks it “a smart move” by the brothers. “The only way they can convince the public not to worry their heads about climate change and to forget about regulating the fossil fuel industry is to create their own media megaphone,” she said.