Last August, Jane Mayer wrote a long investigative article in The New Yorker about the Koch brothers, the conservative billionaires who bankroll a host of right-wing causes. Since then, she's apparently become the victim of a disturbing, organized smear campaign.
Mayer, who's reported extensively on America's use of torture during the "War on Terror" and co-authored books on Clarence Thomas and Ronald Reagan, is certainly no stranger to peals of right-wing outrage. But her work on the reclusive Koch brothers (whose official objections to the story are laid out in this letter) seems to have raised it to a new level. Sources tell us that rumors have been circulating for some time now that a private investigator was hired to dig up dirt on Mayer in the wake of the Koch brothers story. (Dirty business, but that sort of thing does happen.)
http://gawker.com/5725466/the-desperate-campaign-to-discredit-jane-mayer?skyline=true&s=i