Oil-and-chemical billionaire David Koch lobbies hard to influence U.S. politics and environment and energy policy. Did his money influence the kind of coverage presented on public television?
"Last fall, Alex Gibney, a documentary filmmaker who won an Academy Award in 2008 for an exposé of torture at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan, completed a film called 'Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream.' It was scheduled to air on PBS on November 12th. The movie had been produced independently, in part with support from the Gates Foundation. 'Park Avenue' is a pointed exploration of the growing economic inequality in America and a meditation on the often self-justifying mind-set of 'the one per cent.' As a narrative device, Gibney focusses on one of the most expensive apartment buildings in Manhattan—740 Park Avenue—portraying it as an emblem of concentrated wealth and contrasting the lives of its inhabitants with those of poor people living at the other end of Park Avenue, in the Bronx."
Jane Mayer reports for the New Yorker May 27, 2013.
