John Hinderaker:
On March 20, the Washington Post published an article by Steven Mufson and Julie Eilperin, the import of which was that Koch Industries is the driving force behind the Keystone Pipeline. The article, based entirely on a six-month-old report by a far-left group called the International Forum on Globalization that I demolished last October, was headlined, “The biggest lease holder in Canada’s oil sands isn’t Exxon Mobil or Chevron. It’s the Koch brothers.” The piece’s point was summarized succinctly in a quote by a spokesman for IFG: “IFG’s intention is to demonstrate the Koch-Keystone connection.”
I critiqued the Post story here, pointing out that Koch Industries has neither supported nor opposed the pipeline nor lobbied for it or against it; that Keystone would actually damage Koch’s economic interests by giving Alberta oil more outlets in the U.S., rather than being funneled toward Koch’s Minnesota refinery; that Koch owns only 3% of the Alberta oil sands leaseholds by area, and is not, in fact the biggest leaseholder; and that none of the existing or planned Athabasca oil development projects involve Koch. Koch Industries, in short, has nothing at all to do with the Keystone Pipeline.
My post caused consternation, to the point where the Post promised Koch Industries a correction, and reporters Mufson and Eilperin felt obliged to respond to me by explaining why they wrote their article in the first place, given that they couldn’t argue with any of the facts I presented. Their explanation was that the article was politically motivated, intended to “stir and inflame public debate in this election year.” I critiqued that explanation here, offering an alternative: the Post published the false and misleading article on Koch and Keystone because the Post is a Democratic Party newspaper and wished to advance a Democratic Party talking point. I also pointed out that the paper’s reporters are part of an incestuous web of D.C. influence that is tightly tied in with the Democratic Party and its donors.
Another shoe dropped a few days later, when Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and Congressman Henry Waxman wrote a long letter to the President of Koch Industries, posing a series of questions about Koch’s ostensible relationship to the Keystone Pipeline and requesting that Koch produce a long list of documents on the same topic. The letter repeatedly footnoted the March 20 Washington Post article and the IFG report on which it was based.
That raised another series of questions: did Eilperin and Mufson write their article not just to advance a Democratic Party talking point, but in explicit collaboration with Whitehouse, Waxman or other representatives of the Democratic Party? Was the article a put-up job, written for the specific purpose of being used by Whitehouse and Waxman in their attack on Koch? I asked those questions here, in a post titled, “Bombshell In WaPo/Keystone Scandal: Did the Post Coordinate With Congressional Democrats?” In order to get to the bottom of the scandal, I emailed Eilperin, Mufson and others at the Post and asked a series of questions, and requested production of documents, about the reporters’ contacts with Whitehouse, Waxman and others in connection with the March 20 story. Having received no answer, I sent a follow-up email to the Post employees. I also sent a similar series of questions and requests for documents to Waxman and Whitehouse.
So far, the Post, Whitehouse and Waxman have all continued to stonewall. They refuse to say whether they collaborated in producing the false March 20 article. They will neither confirm nor deny that the Post story was a set-up, placed by the Democratic Party in order to facilitate the Whitehouse/Waxman attack.
Which doesn’t mean that Eilperin and Mufson have forgotten the whole thing. Not at all. Because yesterday, they published a follow-up to their March 20 story. Did this article address the fact that Koch has zero interest in the Keystone Pipeline? No. Did it deal with the fact that Koch plays no part in any of the major existing or projected oil sands developments? No. Did it respond in any way to the fact that building the Keystone Pipeline would hurt, rather than help, Koch Industries’ business interests? No. Did it address the fact that Koch has not even taken a public position on Keystone, and has done nothing to push either for or against its construction? No.
Instead, Eilperin and Mufson published a long, navel-gazing discussion of how many acres of leasehold interest various companies have in the Alberta oil sands, the conclusion of which is that the claim they made in their March 20 story was false: Koch Industries is not, in fact, the largest leaseholder. Which is one of the many things I wrote in my original post.
