On Wednesday, President Trump tweeted that the New York Times was the “enemy of the people.” In response, the Charles Koch Institute issued a statement claiming it supports press freedom. The Koch statement declares “for a free press to continue to flourish in the United States, journalists and news outlets must be free from intimidation.” The “repeated denigration of journalists erodes such vital norms and institutions as cultural trust in media, a nonpartisan commitment to the pursuit of truth, and our country’s free press,” CKI spokesperson Sarah Ruger says in the statement. “What’s at stake is the continued ability of news outlets to empower the public with information necessary to hold those in power to account.”
To round out the appearance of truly supporting the noble goals of a free press, CKI points to its token donations to press groups. (We and others have previously called these out as an attempt to whitewash the Koch image.)
Given that the Kochs have hired private investigators to harass journalists who reported on them, like Jane Mayer and Lee Fang, we’ve got reason to doubt their commitment to journalistic freedom. Apparently, the Kochs only support journalism that “hold those in power to account” if those in power aren’t the Kochs.
It gets worse though. The Kochs not only directly attack journalists, but Mayer, Fang and others have shown how the Kochs have built a fake news ecosystem that the Trump administration regularly uses in its campaign of “repeated denigration of journalists.”
As Sludge’s Alex Kotch reported back in November, the Charles Koch Foundation and the Charles Koch Institute appear to be the primary funder of the Daily Caller, with their combined near million dollar donation making up 83% of the Daily Caller News Foundation’s 2017 budget. In a subsequent report, Kotch explained how the Daily Caller’s Michael Bastasch, whose whole career has been as a Koch operative, generated several posts that the EPA used to attack the National Climate Assessment and the media’s coverage of it.
This is just one of many examples of the EPA using the Daily Caller to attack the press and otherwise “erode… a nonpartisan commitment to the pursuit of truth.” For example, last march the EPA sent out a press release pointing to a Bastasch story on Pruitt’s pro-smoking science policy. The agency has done this at least four times--as though the Daily Caller were real media and not the Koch’s pet project.
The Daily Caller has even defended the administration when it assaulted a reporter. The AP’s Ellen Knickmeyer tweeted last May that EPA guards “shoved her forcibly out of the EPA building” to prevent her and two others from reporting. In response, the Daily Caller quickly penned a story casting doubt on her claims.
We could go on, and write about how the people the Kochs pay to deny climate change in various front groups, like Heartland and Heritage, routinely attack reporters who dare to follow the evidence on climate change in “a nonpartisan commitment to the pursuit of truth.” But you get the point.
We absolutely agree with the Kochs on the need for a free press. But a bought press, like the Daily Caller? That we can certainly do without.
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