Winners: The incomparable Jane Mayer, for her devastating portrait in The New Yorker of David Koch,   who has bought his way into New York society with tens of millions of dollars of donations to cultural institutions like the American Ballet Theatre, while simultaneously financing climate-change denying and pollution promoting think tanks, and her editor, David Remnick, for publishing the piece after New York magazine had published a mostly-gushing profile  of the same subject.

Koch’s handlers used the hoary technique of trying to kill one piece by promoting another one, in this case by cooperating with New York’s friendly reporter,
Sinner Andrew Goldman, while denying Mayer access to Koch and most of his closest associates.  The strategy succeeded in producing the profile Koch wanted in New York, but failed to kill the devastating piece in The New Yorker authored by Mayer.   A few examples of the reporters’ contrasting approaches:

Mayer: Greenpeace issued a report identifying [Koch's] company as a “kingpin of climate science denial.”  The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies—from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program—that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus.

Goldman: [Koch] also opposes the president’s climate-change proposals.

Mayer: In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States.

Goldman: In his office, Koch showed me a photocopied flyer Greenpeace had produced with sketches of him and Charles below the words "Wanted for Climate Crimes" and shook it in the air. Koch Industries’ emissions, Koch told me, are far less than legally required.

Mayer: Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan watchdog group, said, “The Kochs are on a whole different level. There’s no one else who has spent this much money. The sheer dimension of it is what sets them apart. They have a pattern of lawbreaking, political manipulation, and obfuscation. I’ve been in Washington since Watergate, and I’ve never seen anything like it. They are the Standard Oil of our times.”

Goldman: Richard Fink insists that Koch’s political activity is about principles, not money. “I view David as a courageous American who has a set of beliefs that he’s willing to support consistently over time despite all the flak he gets,” Fink says. “Very few people would do that.”

Sinner: Martin Luther King Jr. biographer Taylor Branch, for a bizarre op-ed piece in The Times, in which he praised Glenn Beck’s recent rally in front of the Lincoln Memorial because Beck “made peace for one day with the liberal half of the American heritage. That is a good thing. Our political health, in the spirit of Dr. King’s march, requires thoughtful and bold initiatives from all quarters.”

Branch noted that his “cringing search” of Beck’s  archives had turned up “diatribes on Dr. King as a dangerous socialist, and on President Obama as an alien Muslim,” but utterly failed to convey the right-wing pundit’s habitual tone (and perpetual tears).  

Among mainstream reporters, only Dana Milbank has managed to do that recently: “Consider these tallies from Glenn Beck's show on Fox News since Obama's inauguration: 202 mentions of Nazis or Nazism, according to transcripts, 147 mentions of Hitler, 193 mentions of fascism or fascist, and another 24 bonus mentions of Joseph Goebbels. Most of these were directed in some form at Obama -- as were the majority of the 802 mentions of socialist or socialism on Beck's nightly ‘report.’”

Note to Branch: one day without hatred does not compensate for 24 months of non-stop insanity.

As the great Arthur Gelb has pointed out, the kid-gloves treatment of Beck by so much of the mainstream press is revoltingly reminiscent of the way most of the establishment treated red-baiter Joe McCarthy, before Ed Murrow and others finally turned on him.   The reason then, and now, was fear.

Winner:  Michael J. Mishak for a brilliant dissection  of how Meg Whitman has already spent $104 million of her own money in her quest for the governorship of California–just $5 million less than Michael Bloomberg spent to be re-elected Mayor for a third term in New York City. 

Mishak reports: "Those donations have allowed her to target her campaign mailings to the smallest subsets of voters and sort out which television shows are popular among independent voters. (It turns out they are big fans of "Bones," the crime show rife with romantic tension, on which Whitman has aired ads.) Dozens of outside consultants and a paid staff the size of some presidential campaigns run an operation that seems to be the living embodiment of Whitman's book title: "The Power of Many.""

Sinner: Martin Peretz for an even more repellent post than usual about the mosque controversy, in which he declared “Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims. And among those Muslims led by the Imam Rauf there is hardly one who has raised a fuss about the routine and random bloodshed that defines their brotherhood.  So, yes, I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.”  

Fifty years ago, it was singularly appropriate that the Jewish establishment in America was one of the pillars of the black Civil Rights Movement.   The contrast between that natural sensitivity to prejudice and the disgusting declarations of Peretz and the Anti-Defamation League  could not be more striking–or more distasteful.

Winner: Barry Eisler, for his splendid new novel, Inside Out--the first pro-gay, anti-torture C.I.A. thriller of the new millenium–a riveting page turner with a very unusual social-conscience.

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