Investigating Power
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.
The Center for Media and Democracy’s Mary Bottari told the Guardian she considered it “a smart move” on Koch’s part. “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,” said Bottari.
Mary Battari, from the Center for Media and Democracy told the Guardian she considered it “a smart move” on Koch’s part. “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.”
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.
While its name suggests it is “for” consumers, in fact, SourceWatch.org says CEA [Consumer Energy Alliance] is a “front group for the energy industry that opposes political efforts to regulate carbon standards while advancing deep water and land-based drilling for oil and methane gas.”
Companies such as Exxon Mobil Corp., which says it accounts for climate change in its investment decisions, have also sponsored the organization [ALEC], according to the Center for Media and Democracy.
The Bradley Foundation, whose founder, Harry Bradley, was a member of the John Birch Society, gave out more than $42.5 million in 2015 (the last year for which its tax return is available), including a half-million-dollar grant to the Freedom Foundation. Documents obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy showed that union-busting to defund Democrats has been an aim of Bradley Foundation grant-making for at least 14 years. The documents include notes about many of the foundation’s grants that are similar to one attached to a $100,000 gift to Colorado’s Independence Institute, for “neutralizing the power of Colorado’s teachers’ unions by defunding them at the local school district level.”
Via a Center for Media and Democracy report out this a.m.: “In the 2016 federal elections, 147 private equity firms and the individuals in them gave $92 million to federal candidates and committees …
“That’s more than double the $39 million the same group of donors gave in the 2012 elections. The amount only represents private equity, not firms primarily involved in venture capital or those running hedge funds”
Jessica Mason of PR Watch reported that Teachout was popular in rural upstate New York where people were organizing against fracking. She said that “dozens of towns across New York have considered banning fracking through zoning ordinances, a move the New York Supreme Court ruled legal in late July. Bans have passed in some 79 municipalities in New York state, concentrated in upstate counties like Otsego and Tompkins, both of which gave over 70 percent of their vote to Teachout.”