Paying for “Citizen Koch”

[TalkingDog]

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/08/citizen-koch-documentary-kickstarter.html

It appears that “Citizen Koch,” an embattled documentary about the influence of money on politics, which suffered a near-death experience after the public-television system withdrew its support, may survive after all.

As I reported recently in The New Yorker, public-television officials abruptly withdrew financial support for the film amid growing worries that the project would displease David Koch, a billionaire industrialist and longtime public-television funder, whose political activism the film cast in harsh light. Now, however, as the Times reported Tuesday, the documentary’s creators, Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, have managed to raise enough money independently to finish the film—more, in fact, than the original hundred and fifty thousand dollars that they had expected from public television.

Lessin and Deal raised the money through Kickstarter, the online funding mechanism through which members of the public can pledge donations. By today, their drive had attracted some thirty-four hundred donors, ranking “Citizen Koch” among the top one per cent of all Kickstarter campaigns.

On Tuesday, I asked Lessin and Deal about their campaign. “Our experience with crowdfunding ‘Citizen Koch’ shows that thousands of small donors, in concert, can counter the big money deployed by billionaires like the Kochs,” Lessin said. The worry had been that their experience would make public television more risk-averse; now, Deal said, “We hope public-television executives get the message that when they allow private interests to influence their programming and funding decisions, the public will take notice and take action.”