Reporter Exposes Koch Approved Journalists Spreading Propaganda

I Tried to Cover the Secret Koch Retreat and Here's What They Did to Me

The Koch brothers' donor retreats are notoriously secretive affairs, but after my publishing of several hours of audio from their 2014 summer confab, the network began to bring select journalists behind its closed doors. With strings attached. Six media outlets gained access this year under the condition of not disclosing donor identities, while the Kochs enlisted hotel security staff and police officers to intimidate this reporter from exercising her First Amendment rights.

As Koch grand strategist Richard Fink sat in the Glo Lounge of the posh Renaissance Esmeralda Indian Wells resort in Palm Springs on Thursday, I heard his communications staff report to him that Fredreka Schouten of USA Today was "prepped." Sure enough, just hours later, at 5 AM on Jan. 29, her piece went live on the USA Today site: "Koch brothers' new group will take on poverty, education."

The media has come under greater and greater control of just a handful of corporate titans, and can no longer be considered anything remotely reliable as a news source. Investigative journalism is dead. Perhaps has been for the past decade or more. These six "approved" media outlets have been groomed by the Koch's to spew their 1% lies. They've bought Congress, the political parties, and now they're working on the press. What happens to those "reporters" who don't go along? Out of a job, out of the industry.

There is privacy for those that can afford to pay for it through the courts of law, then there are the rest of us.

The U.K has introduced laws to protect the rich, they can afford public banning orders, while they are doing their upmost to eradicate everybody else's rights.

Why did the Government allow Google to pay the equivalent of 3% tax over the last 10 years? They must have a sharing of information agreement in place, surely?

a reply to: Blackmarketeer

Now let's see you crash a Soros meeting place......

a reply to: nwtrucker
What does Soros have to do with anything?

Do two wrongs make a right?

I'm sick of this equivalence justification. Get some damn morals.

a reply to: nwtrucker

I'd be interested to know how that would play out as well.

Do you have a link to any political donors meetings that Soros hosted? And how was access restricted, and reporters briefed on what to report?

-dex

a reply to: Greven

Get some morals? You might consider taking your own advice.
The Koch brothers are up front with their political views and support. They aren't political figures. They can keep out who they want. I'd do no different than them. Outta my face.


Of course we don't get the same coverage on ATS about those billionaires that support the left...do we? Where's your 'morals' now???

a reply to: DexterRiley

The chances of seeing such an event by Soros getting the same exposure as the Koch Brothers? Slim, at best. (at a guess)


BTW did you see the warning China gave Soros against selling short the Yuan? No repeat of the English pound....

What Happened to Jane Mayer When She Wrote About the Koch Brothers

Out of the blue in the fall of 2010, a blogger asked Jane Mayer, a writer with The New Yorker, how she felt about the private investigator who was digging into her background. Ms. Mayer thought the idea was a joke, she said this week. At a Christmas party a few months later, she ran into a former reporter who had been asked about helping with an investigation into another reporter on behalf of two conservative billionaires.

“The reporter had written a story they disliked,” Ms. Mayer recounts in “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right,” out this month from Doubleday. Her acquaintance told her, “‘It occurred to me afterward that the reporter they wanted to investigate might be you.’”
........
Ms. Mayer began to take the rumored investigation seriously when she heard from her New Yorker editor that she was going to be accused — falsely — of plagiarism, stealing the work of other writers. A dossier of her supposed plagiarism had been provided to reporters at The New York Post and The Daily Caller, but the smears collapsed when the writers who were the purported victims made statements saying that it was nonsense, and that there had been no plagiarism whatsoever. Indeed, as one noted, Ms. Mayer had plainly credited his writing — though this was not mentioned in the bill of particulars that was passed around.

There was more. Ms. Mayer would learn that these same dark forces had dug into a friend from her college years, with some notion of using the friend’s later problems against her. “I’m 60,” Ms. Mayer noted. “That was a long time ago.”

Who was behind this?

Figuring that out took three years, Ms. Mayer said, and she writes that she traced it to a “boiler room” operation involving several people who have worked closely with Koch business concerns.
......
Two other Washington figures identified by Ms. Mayer in the operation, Philip Ellender, who heads Koch’s government affairs arm, and Nancy Pfotenhauer, who has served as president of a nonprofit advocacy group funded by the Kochs, did not respond to messages requesting comment.

Corporate STASI.

a reply to: nwtrucker

BTW did you see the warning China gave Soros against selling short the Yuan? No repeat of the English pound....

It's a bit off topic, but we do need to realize that there a billionaires on both sides of the political spectrum. Soros could be considered the left-wing equivalent of the Kochs. Like the Kochs actions, he hasn't necessarily done anything illegal. However he was responsible for the early 1990s crash of the English Pound, and believed by some to be responsible for the 1997 Asian market crash.

I hadn't heard about this recent Soros-Chinese flap. Here's a link if anyone else is interested. It would appear that when Soros talks, people listen.

Here is something from the above linked CNBC article:

In a strange twist to the China-Soros tale, the chief of China's National Bureau of Statistics, Wang Baoan, was among the officials talking up the yuan in the wake of Soros' comments.

On Tuesday, Wang gave a speech saying that there was "no basis for long-term yuan depreciation." Just hours later, it was announced that he had been detained in a corruption investigation.

-dex

a reply to: DexterRiley


Thanks for the response. Look, I was a bit torqued off at the original post and comment and was a bit testy. Apologies.


The Koch Brothers get dumped on with regularity . I bugs me when the self-righteous go out of their way digging into them and ignore others of similar ilk, or worse get no coverage at all.

Two standards is the current system in our politics. I find them more honest in their motivations than others. I admire them for standing up for themselves rather than back-room machinations. Propaganda is the norm. it has been for decades, apparently.


Not how I operate at all, much to the dismay of others...LOL.


Anyways
, that about covers it for me. Good day.