The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer is out with a new book, Dark Money, purporting to unmask those dastardly Koch brothers and their infamous habit of spending money to support libertarian and conservative causes. Her 2010 New Yorker article “Covert Operations” succeeded in vilifying the Kochs among progressive voters in spite of being riddled with strange accusations and dubious assumptions. Her book seems to be no different.
Aside from running a glowing review, the New York Times splashed a big scoop taken straight from Mayer, “Father of Koch Brothers Helped Build Nazi Oil Refinery, Book Says.” The story in question reveals that the senior Koch built part of an oil refinery in Hamburg in 1933, six years before Germany invaded Poland, at a time when nearly every sizable American corporation—GM, Coke, IBM, et al.—was still doing business in Germany.
The blowback from the article’s sensational charge was such that the Times ran a follow-up article best described as a weaselly, passive-voiced semi-acknowledgment that the critics had a point. Still, they ran it under an insulting headline: “Koch Executive Disputes Book’s Account of Founder’s Role in Nazi Refinery.”
Perhaps more insulting is that at no point did the New York Times acknowledge some obvious conflicts of interest. Mayer is married to Bill Hamilton, the Times‘s Washington editor. And Times reporter Nicholas Confessore, who wrote both articles about the Kochs, is thanked in the acknowledgments of Mayer’s book.
If this were simply about the Times running advertorials to goose book sales for a top editor’s wife, that’s bad enough. But this baseless attack on the Kochs also subordinates journalistic standards to further the cause of liberal politicians. On that score, Mayer is a repeat offender, but far from the worst the New Yorker has ever produced. That honor belongs to Sidney Blumenthal, who under the guise of covering the ’96 election for the New Yorker shared with the Clinton campaign what he learned as a reporter. He later went to work at the White House.
Blumenthal was such an odious character, the Obama White House wouldn’t let Hillary Clinton hire him years later at the State Department. But he still managed to be at the center of the recent congressional Benghazi investigation because emails revealed Clinton was entertaining his war-profiteering scheme in Libya.
Among the emails Blumenthal sent Clinton at the State Department was this gem from November 2012, in which he forwards to Clinton the following message from Mayer to himself:
Omigod—there’s a new twist. You won’t believe who tipped off the FBI—you are so right that it has the stench of dirty tricks. I think it may just be a Times story so I have to keep my mouth shut for a few more hours, but you’re going to like this.
So there you have it. A New Yorker writer passes on a juicy tidbit from her New York Times editor husband to one of Washington’s most mendacious and disreputable figures, who then passes it on to the Democratic secretary of state who, inexplicably, hangs on his every word. If The Scrapbook didn’t want to keep those invites to Georgetown cocktail parties coming, we might consider loudly pointing out that the Beltway media establishment is thoroughly corrupt.
