The "liberal" New Yorker & its pieces on the Koch brothers

[Hannah Bell]

The Koch brothers and their works became a liberal target because of an article in The New Yorker that was highly critical of the Koches, presenting them as a right wing center for opposition to Barack Obama's "progressive" policies. The New Yorker article appeared on August 30, 2010, written by Jane Meyer, was called "Covert Operations, The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama..."

But the The New Yorker has also become famous in recent years for its teacher bashing and anti-union propaganda pieces. The most famous of these was the August 2009 hatchet job on teacher rights covering the so-called "rubber rooms..." Brill's Rubber Room article was unabashed (and wildly inaccurate) propaganda for the version of "school reform" being pushed by then New York Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and equally important support for Arne Duncan and Barack Obama's early "Race to the Top" stuff.

Brill's Rubber Room article, which appeared in The New Yorker less than nine months after Obama's inauguration, and while "Race to the Top" was still taking form, might also be viewed as corporate America's opening salvo in the attack on teacher unions through the "bad teacher" propaganda angle that has now become infamous.
But let's remind ourselves that The New Yorker, through Steven Brill, was setting up the teacher unions for the "bad teacher" narrative long before Bill Gates or "Waiting for Superman" became synonymous with privatization propaganda and bashing public school teachers.

If The New Yorker picks certain targets for its supposed investigations, it also reserves puff pieces for others. One of those celebrated in The New Yorker has been, over the years, Barack Obama. More recently (in February 2010, about a year ago), the New Yorker puffery has been given to Arne Duncan and the policies of the Obama administration's U.S. Department of Education, "Race to the Top..." At the least, anything The New Yorker published establishing some kind of enemies list for the Obama administration requires a second look, even if the first tendency of "progressives" would be to cheer on what The New Yorker has published about Koch. As the politics of the USA becomes more subtle, anyone who has moved to the left since the heady days of audacious hope might want to take a second look at New Yorker reporting as propaganda for a particular corporate viewpoint — even if that reporting is directed against an easy target, like the Koch Brothers and Koch Industries. In the case of The New Yorker, the old liberal imperialist maxim "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" might require a critical look before a newly reborn left and socialist trade union movement takes firmer form.

http://www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=2078§ion=Article