Jane Mayer, New Koch: Rebranding the Koch Brothers. The New Yorker, 25 January 2016. “The billionaire brothers are championing criminal-justice reform. Has their formula changed?… On the night of November 2nd [2015], well-dressed Wichita residents formed a line that snaked through the lobby of the city’s convention center. They all held tickets to the Wichita Metro Chamber of Commerce’s annual gala, which had drawn thirty-five hundred people. The evening’s featured speaker, Charles Koch, had lived in town almost all of his eighty years, but few locals—even prominent ones—had ever laid eyes on him. Charles, along with his brother David, owns virtually all of the energy-and-chemical conglomerate Koch Industries, which is based in Wichita and has annual revenues of a hundred and fifteen billion dollars. Charles’s secretive manner, right-wing views, and concerted campaign to exert political influence by spending his fortune have made him an object of fascination, especially in his home town. “You never see him,” one local newsman whispered.”
October 1, 2014
PBS Self-Destructs
Eugenia Williamson, PBS Self-Destructs. Harper’s, October 2014. (Subscription only, but non-subscribers can read one article per month as guests.) “Last October, I watched as a passel of activists convened in front of WGBH, Boston’s public-television station. There were about three dozen of them on the concrete forecourt…. WGBH employees, as well as cameramen and reporters on hand to cover the protest, weaved through the crowd. The grassroots climate-change group Forecast the Facts had organized the rally as an attempt to expel David Koch from the station’s board of trustees. The members had collected and printed out 120,000 digital signatures and placed them in boxes, which they planned to present at that afternoon’s board meeting. ”