UPDATE: Joe Lehman, president of the Mackinac Center, sent me a message commenting on this post and it's reliance on Media Matters:
Finding something incorrect in Tim Nash's article would be interesting and newsworthy. Demonstrating that an organization with a multi-million-dollar annual budget bends to the will of a donor who gave $80,000 years ago would be interesting and newsworthy. I have a poster in my office (found at the RTW protests at the capitol) that shows the Koch Brothers controlling the Mackinac Center. It always gets a laugh when people visit my office!
Media Matters is a left-wing organization obsessed with dogging the likes of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, but sometimes their research comes up with a nice nugget that nails the conservatives for manipulating the media.
The Midland Daily News is the newest media outlet nailed by Media Matters for printing an Op-Ed column praising the billionaire Koch brothers without explaining that the author has obvious ties to the Koch brothers. Of course, the Kochs are playing a significant role in Michigan by pouring millions of dollars into the Senate campaign of Terri Lynn Land.
Here's how Media Matters explained the situation:
"In his October 26 op-ed in the Midland Daily News, Timothy Nash, identified as 'vice president and economics professor at Northwood University,' praised the economic success of Koch Industries and of the philanthropy of the company's leaders, Charles and David Koch.
"Nash rejected those who criticize the Kochs for their political action, attributing their political spending, which reached over $400 million in 2012 and is setting records in 2014, to "a belief in, passion for, and support of the traditional values that have made America great."
"However, the Midland Daily News failed to reveal Nash's own significant and beneficial relationship to the Koch brothers. In February 2011, Nash was announced as the director of the Koch Scholars program at Northwood University, which is funded by the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. In addition, Nash is listed as an adjunct professor with the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a Koch-funded think tank. According to the Center for Media and Democracy's Source Watch database:
The Mackinac Center has received significant funding from the Koch family foundations as well as other funding organizations with ties to the Koch brothers. The Charles G. Koch Foundation donated $79,151 between 2005 and 2009, and the Claude R. Lambe Foundation gave Mackinac a donation of $5,000 in 2001. Between 2010 and 2012, the Mackinac Center received $1,494,000 from the Koch conduits DonorTrust and Donors Capital Fund.
"As 'the largest conservative state-level policy think tank in the nation,' the Mackinac Center is ... also affiliated with the Franklin Center, which attempts to infiltrate state news coverage and seeks to fill a void in statehouse news reporting while promoting conservative misinformation. The Koch brothers fund the Franklin Center indirectly through Donors Trust, a foundation that has been dubbed "the dark money ATM of the conservative movement" due to the lack of transparency of its donors and the numerous conservative organizations the foundation funds."
That language is a bit bombastic, but it seems clear that the Kochs, Nash and the Mackinac Center are all part of an ultraconservative libertarian league of their own.
No comments:
Post a Comment