It appears that our once-upon-a-time paper of record The Boston Globe is supplementing revenues by publishing pro-corporate content masquerading as news and paid for by the Koch Brothers.
Since corporate puffery isn’t one of my favored literary genres I didn’t pay much attention when I noticed the Bold Types interviews off to the side of the Globe web page (and I usually read the print version anyway). But CommonwealthMagazine had it back on March 28 and good for them.
Why is Koch Industries paying for content on the Globe?
First of all consider, paying for content on the Globe? Wow. Who gets to do that? Folks with the money the Kochs have, that’s who.
The Kochs are no fools. They are in a long game to tip the nation’s ideological balance toward the free market paradise they envision for themselves: undo regulations, decimate unions, control politicians (hello Scott Walker!), deny climate change, and untax the one percent. To folks like the Kochs democracy itself presents a vast danger so their ultimate goal is, to note Nancy MacLean’s essential book, to place Democracy in Chains.
Part of the Kochs’ long game is the deification of capitalism as the provider of all that is good and worthy; thus this soft focus series on Boston’s corporate do-gooding heroes.
Now if you’ll excuse me I must toss my Globe into the Charles, light up a mango Juul (adults only!), and find a quiet spot at the Sackler Museum to work on my next lecture to the freshmen, titled “How to maintain one’s youthful idealism.”
*Title borrowed from UnKochMyCampus.org, a site started by university students working to undo Koch influence on higher education. Check out the donate button.
[Full disclosure: as an educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about dark money (and other things)].