Koch PR consultants continue to work overtime to enhance the brothers’ aura of beneficence and foster an illusion of accessibility.
Why? They’re nervous.
“The Koch brothers could be depicted as comic-book villains,” a Koch network donor recently lamented, according to Time. “They never really wanted the attention,” he reportedly said, continuing, “Our side has done a very bad job telling our story. We’ve been defined by the other side.”
The point is, as Time’s Philip Elliott put it: “[T]he Koch brothers are starting to contemplate their legacies.” And for the Kochs, “contemplating a legacy” equates to “buying a legacy” — to wit: further revving up the best PR machine their billions can buy.
It’s a narrative the Kochs and their cadre of PR professionals, through familiarity, have become quite good at spinning, but they aren’t fooling everyone. News outlets are catching on to the immense degree of Koch control governing any of the brothers’ media availabilities — control that enables them and their handlers to shape narratives as they see fit.
Just this week, an Oregon Register-Guard editorial vigorously decried restrictions on journalists at a recent Koch network retreat:
Reporters were not to publicly identify any of the 450 Koch donors without the donor’s permission […] the truth is, the journalists who attended the event were dancing to the Kochs’ tune, in exchange for possibly gaining some insight into the level of funding support that may — or may not — come this year and next for Republican presidential candidates. And that’s a slippery slope.
And news outlets are catching on to the Kochs’ other subversive activities as well. Only several days earlier, the Charlotte Observer published an editorial denouncing a Koch brothers-backed effort in the North Carolina state legislature — legislation that the paper said would have a tremendously negative effect on the state:
This Koch-Brothers-backed [“Taxpayer Bill of Rights”] effort would artificially restrain the state from responding to crises and from making decisions about spending on education, health care and other areas. It would also probably lead to higher sales taxes and could threaten the state’s credit rating.
The media is catching on to the Kochs’ efforts to manipulate the press and their attempts to advance their legislative agenda through exertions of political power — and the Kochs are getting nervous.
How do we know?
They are literally enlisting donors “to put their names to op-ed articles in national and local newspapers, helping shift attention away from the two brothers,” according to the New York Times.
The Kochs’ various cause du jour campaigns are all PR, nothing more.
And as the media continues to catch on to Kochs’ PR sham and the curtain is lifted, the Koch PR joke will be not just be interrupted — it will be exposed as the fraud that it is.