Watch Park Avenue: Money, Power & the American Dream on PBS. See more from Why Poverty?.
You may not know that David Koch of the infamous Koch Brothers is a major philanthropist… when he isn’t busy trying to pry Social Security away from the takers. Among his favorite causes is (or was) public broadcasting.
That all began to change when PBS announced that it was airing Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream, a documentary by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney. The film portrays the psychology and sociology of certain members of this country’s plutocracy, among them the fourth richest man in America, David Koch:
Park Avenue includes a multifaceted portrait of the Koch brothers, telling the history of their family company and chronicling their many donations to universities and think tanks. It features comments from allies like Tim Phillips, the president of the Kochs’ main advocacy group, Americans for Prosperity, and from activists in the Tea Party, including Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, who share the Kochs’ opposition to high taxes and regulation.
Despite the best efforts of employees of New York’s PBS outlet WNET — as recently detailed by The New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer in “A Word From Our Sponsor” — the film ended up offending David Koch, who ended up canceling a large donation he had planned to the station.
Why was Koch so offended? Watch for yourself and find out:
