Brave New Foundation and the Koch Machine

Brave New Foundation and the Koch Machine

In the 1940’s and 50’s, and somewhat on into the ‘60’s, in this country we felt sorry for the Russian people because their only source of news was Pravda, the state run newspaper.  We, of course, had a newspaper industry that was free and unfettered and by and large we could rely on what we what we read if the paper had a good reputation.  This continued on to a certain degree in the early days of television when we had such news people as Walter Cronkite, Eric Sevareid, Edward R. Murrow, Huntley and Brinkley, and some others.  We could applaud Murrow’s investigations of Joseph McCarthy in the 50’s.  In fact, this writer put the first bumper sticker around while at UC Davis that read, “Joe Must Go”, much to the horror of my dear father-in-law, who at the time was an attorney in Los Angeles.  The poor Russians, however, only had Pravda.  We understood that what they did was read the paper and would figure out the opposite as being what was really true.   

I hadn’t thought of any of this for some time until in Reader Supported News (readersupportednews.org) there was an article: Koch Brothers’ Campaign to Kill Social Security, Matt Taibi, 6/23/11.  The article featured a short video featuring Bernie Sanders and The Brave New Foundation.  (www.bravenewfoundation.org)

For some time I have noticed that there would be the big right-wing push of the month.   Not in any particular order, there was abortion, homophobia, public employees bankrupting cities, counties, states or federal government, ACORN, Planned Parenthood, ‘Obamacare’, Social Security and on and on.  The thing that I noticed in these onslaughts was that the announcers were all saying the same thing.  Again, it seemed that someone had popped a flash drive into the back of their heads and all of the same words would emerge, over and over on the topic of the month.

Apparently I was right.  Bernie Sanders, bless his little old Independent heart, has done some investigating into this phenomenon and traced the origin of these diatribes back to the Koch Brothers.  Simply put, the Koch Brothers fund several think tanks such as The Cato Institute and The Heritage Foundation.  These organizations then publish issues papers pushing the Koch Brothers’ agenda of the month.  The media picks up on these issues papers and begins presenting them as though they were news.  Ultra-conservative politicians begin pressing these as real issues that must be immediately addressed or else all sorts of fearful things will happen.  Since these issues all emerge from the same source, they do sound all the same.  And often, the same words will be used over and over.  It is the ultimate in the old saying, “A lie can go around the world while the truth is pulling up its pants.”  Or the infamous, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

Our job is to pick out these repetitions, which really is pretty easy because over just one or two weeks, they will start popping up.  Usually on the Fox shows first, since Fox is the outlet for this kind of stuff.  By the way, if you watch Fox, try another channel for news.  If and when we are in a position to mention that we have noticed a new rash of lies, we should mention them.  After all, we all know that a steady diet from the Koch Machine is bad for your health.