Mr. Sid Holt
Chief Executive
American Society of Magazine Editors

Dear Mr. Holt:

On behalf of Koch Industries, Inc., I am writing to raise serious concerns about an August 30, 2010 New Yorker article, Covert Operations, by Jane Mayer, which has been nominated for the American Society of Magazine Editors’ (“ASME”) National Magazine Award in the category of Reporting. We previously raised these concerns directly with The New Yorker, which was dismissive of our concerns. As explained in my September 28, 2010 letter to the magazine, Ms. Mayer’s article overwhelmingly relied on sources whose backgrounds and biases were not fully disclosed, obscured key facts from readers, and distorted many other facts about Koch Industries, Charles Koch, and David Koch. Her article is ideologically slanted and a prime example of a disturbing trend in journalism, where agenda-driven advocacy masquerades as objective reporting. Given these facts, it would be inappropriate for ASME to give Ms. Mayer’s article an award in Reporting. There’s nothing wrong with opinion journalism, of course, and indeed ASME has separate awards that rightfully recognize that form. The “Essays and Criticism” category, for instance, applies to “opinions of the writer on topics ranging from the personal to the political.”

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Rather than researching and writing a well-reasoned piece that reflects a complete picture, Jane Mayer and her editors chose to print a blatantly one-sided and partial article based largely on information provided by left-leaning sources with underlying objectives. It is ironic that Mayer baselessly accuses the Kochs of using “slippery organizations with generic-sounding names” and of being “covert” when she herself employs such tactics in her article.

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