According to the New York Post, the Public
Broadcasting Service has suspended
advertising
in Harper’s Magazine after the journal published a
story critical
of David Koch’s relationship to public television. The billionaire
carbon financier and Tea Party funder is on the board of Boston’s
PBS flagship station
WGBH, and until a recent New Yorker exposé
served on the board of New York City’s WNET.
Koch is also on the board overseeing WGBH’s
science program Nova.
The Harper’s story, by journalist Eugenia Williamson, detailed the
campaign by climate
advocacy group Forecast the Facts to get WGBH
to drop Koch (including a profile of the protest and petition delivery I
led at WGBH’s board meeting last November).
Williamson was critical of Koch’s potential influence over the public
television station.
The Post reports:
In the past, Harper’s teamed up with PBS to
sponsor a kickoff event timed to Ken Burns award-winning World War II
documentary.
While there was an ad for the latest Burns saga “The Roosevelts: An
Intimate History,” PBS has pulled ads from
the November and December issues. The ads were supposed to hype the
box set CD editions of the documentary.
“I have to say I am shocked,” John “Rick” MacArthur, the president and
publisher of Harper’s, told Post media reporter Keith J. Kelly. “You’d
think PBS would be above that kind of
tit-for-tat mentality.”
“PBS has lost its moral
compass,”
wrote Forecast the Facts campaign manager Emily Southard in a press
release. “Instead of punishing its critics,
PBS should pull itself away from the influence
of David Koch and others who work to misinform Americans about climate
change.”
PBS earlier
released
a page of talking
points
which claimed the Harper’s piece was “filled with many basic errors,”
but did not name any.
The political organizations founded and run by the Koch brothers —
particularly the Cato Institute and Americans for Prosperity — are
committed against public
funding
for the arts, including public television. Their advocacy over the past
thirty years has successfully decimated federal and local support for
public television. Through these organizations, Koch supports the
miseducation of the public, including children, on the existential
threat of climate change. Koch Industries is one of the nation’s largest
and most toxic polluters, and Koch works to prevent government efforts
to protect the public from that pollution.
WGBH is providing David Koch not only a tax
write-off but also social legitimacy, despite his being one of their
greatest enemies.
Activists with Forecast the Facts and the Better Future Project will be
protesting again in
Boston
and delivering a 400,000-signature petition at
WGBH’s upcoming board meeting on Wednesday,
October 1.