In these uncertain economic times, one would think that people purporting to be compassionate would not seek to push non-profits to voluntarily drop their sponsors and as a result face significant budget shortfalls. But such calculations seem to be utterly unimportant to a group of far-left environmentalists who are targeting a Boston PBS affiliate because it allows conservative billionaire David Koch on its board of directors.
The ideologically bigoted group Forecast the Facts has made Koch the target of a publicity campaign designed to force station WGBH to remove him from its executive leadership, supposedly because his presence there is a “conflict of interest.”
“David Koch has donated millions to climate change denial think tanks, proactively [sic] seeking to misinform Americans and undermine accurate scientific reporting,” the censorial enviro group proclaims on its website. “Someone with his anti-science track record should not have any role overseeing NOVA, or any other WGBH programming.”
The trouble is, however, Koch has never interfered with WGBH’s content by the station’s own admission. With as much scrutiny as the David Koch and his brother Charles receive now that they’ve been declared enemies of the state, if any such interference ever had happened it would have been publicized. As proof, we only have to look at the astonishing amount of coverage that a false claim that Koch had interfered with another PBS station, WNET’s broadcast of a virulently anti-Koch documentary. As of this writing, a Google search for “david koch” wnet turns up about 214,000 web results.
Thankfully for free speech, neither WGBH nor Koch have indicated a willingness to back down in the face of such politically motivated censorship. As my NewsBusters colleague Tim Graham noted over the weekend to the Boston Herald newspaper, “They’re basically saying, ‘I’m sorry, conservatives shouldn’t be on our board. This board is for progressives only. No conservatives need to apply.’”
