Media

• Public television’s attempts to placate David Koch.
• PBS Drone Coverage Brought to You by Drone Makers

Jane Mayer, New Yorker

If you like reading this article, consider contributing a cafe latte to all reader-supported Evergreene Digest--using the donation button above—so we can bring you more just like it.

Koch, the conservative industrialist, has given $23 million to public television. Illustration by Daniel Hertzberg.

May 27, 2013 | Last fall, Alex Gibney, a documentary filmmaker who won an Academy Award in 2008 for an exposé of torture at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan, completed a film called “Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream.” It was scheduled to air on PBS on November 12th. The movie had been produced independently, in part with support from the Gates Foundation. “Park Avenue” is a pointed exploration of the growing economic inequality in America and a meditation on the often self-justifying mind-set of “the one per cent.” As a narrative device, Gibney focusses on one of the most expensive apartment buildings in Manhattan—740 Park Avenue—portraying it as an emblem of concentrated wealth and contrasting the lives of its inhabitants with those of poor people living at the other end of Park Avenue, in the Bronx.

Among the wealthiest residents of 740 Park is David Koch, the billionaire industrialist, who, with his brother Charles, owns Koch Industries, a huge energy-and-chemical conglomerate. The Koch brothers are known for their strongly conservative politics and for their efforts to finance a network of advocacy groups whose goal is to move the country to the right. David Koch is a major philanthropist, contributing to cultural and medical institutions that include Lincoln Center and New York-Presbyterian Hospital. In the nineteen-eighties, he began expanding his charitable contributions to the media, donating twenty-three million dollars to public television over the years.

Full story…

Related:

PBS Drone Coverage Brought to You by Drone Makers, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)

• Lockheed's Nova sponsorship violates underwriting rules <http://fair.org>
• Ask PBS ombud Michael Getler to investigate whether Nova's "Rise of the Drones" violates PBS underwriting guidelines.
• Rise of The Drones
• Drone Warfare ~ Madea Benjamin

• “The government’s power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the government.... The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of the government and inform the people.” —‑U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, New York Times Co. v. United States (6/30/71)
• Official/press collusion to keep public uninformed
• An Itty Bitty Pity Party for the Associated Press

Steve Rendall, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)

At a time when corporations are buying up elections - not to mention the 24-hour news cycle - help ensure that a source for truly independent journalism lives on. Support all reader supported Evergreene Digest today by using the donation button in the above right-hand corner. 

Secrets and censorship, a redacted CIA document--Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

April 1, 2013 | Journalism is supposed to hold power to account. That’s the principle implicit in the U.S. Constitution’s singling out a free press for protection.

If that principle were respected, the Washington Post’s admission (2/6/13) that it and “several news organizations” made a deal with the White House to withhold the news that the U.S. has a drone base in Saudi Arabia would have been a red flag, triggering widespread discussion of media ethics.

Full story…

Related:

An Itty Bitty Pity Party for the Associated Press, William Rivers Pitt, Truthout

• It's funny to me that the Associated Press is nailing itself to a cross because you've been victimized by the same laws, politicians and tide of history you've either blissfully ignored or gleefully promoted for so many years.
• The 'Undo-Everything' Congress: What the Press Doesn't See