According to Jane Mayer, who broke this story last month in the New Yorker, David Koch wasn’t happy about his portrayal and let Neil Shapiro, the president of WNET, know about it. Complicating matters, according to Mayer, was WNET’s expectation that David Koch would donate at least $1 million to its capital campaign.
Mayer wrote that Shapiro attempted to “mollify” Koch by giving him a heads-up about the film, organizing a roundtable debate, and adding a voice-over introduction warning that it was “controversial” and “provocative.” Gibney’s film aired as scheduled but, according to Mayer, Koch canceled whatever plans he had to make a large donation to WNET. (He resigned from the WNET board on May 16; he remains on the board of WGBH.)
That’s how “Citizen Koch” became caught in the crossfire between David Koch and WNET and ITVS. A public-relations official told Mayer that airing “Citizen Koch” on public television “was a real problem, because of ‘Park Avenue.’ Because of the whole thing with the Koch brothers, ITVS knew WNET would never air it. Never.”
ITVS, for its part, couldn’t risk alienating WNET, which has the largest public television audience. On April 15, ITVS told Lessin and Deal that it was pulling the plug on its support for “Citizen Koch.”
“We were stunned,” Lessin told me in a recent interview. “It’s not outright control. They’re just fostering a kind of self-censorship that happens when the public television executives and programmers are guided by what they believe will please or anger the very donors that they rely on.”
Lessin and Deal lost a major portion of their funding and are now paying for the film out of pocket. Some of their vendors haven’t been paid but have been understanding, so far. They also lost their distribution network and a chance for a wider audience to see the film. “Citizen Koch” has been shown at film festivals, but that’s it.
“Look, we’ve suffered,” Lessin said. “The film has suffered. The public television audience doesn’t get to see the film. Now, looming on the horizon, David Koch and Charles Koch seem to be interested in purchasing the Tribune Company newspapers. If they can have the influence over our film -- just by David Koch being on the board of trustees and being a donor - - imagine the influence that they would have if they actually owned these really important papers.”
And, just like that, in this insidious way -- a film censored here, some phone records seized there -- the freedoms that we once took for granted and thought were guaranteed by our Constitution are slowly but surely eroded. This can’t be a good thing.
(William D. Cohan, the author of “Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World,” is a Bloomberg View columnist. He was formerly an investment banker at Lazard Freres, Merrill Lynch and JPMorgan Chase.)