In this week’s New Yorker, Jane Mayer, who has covered the industrialists Charles and David Koch extensively, chronicles the fate of two documentaries produced for PBS, Alex Gibney’s Park Avenue, which explored the lives of both wealthy residents of a single building on one end of the street and poorer New Yorkers at the other, and Citizen Koch, which examined the consequences of the Citizens United decision. Both movies ran into trouble for the same reason: fear of offending David Koch, who has been a major public television donor, and was until recently on the board of New York public television affiliate WNET. While Park Avenue eventually made it to air on PBS, albeit with a recut introduction and a discussion afterwards that excluded Gibney, Citizen Koch, which was initially supposed to be part of the Independent Lens series, ended up off the lineup. Whether or not David Koch was involved, Mayer’s story would still be interesting as an illustration of what happens when two different philanthropic models bump up against each other.

On one side are the foundations. Gibney’s documentary, Mayer reported, “had been produced independently, in part with support from the Gates Foundation.” And both Park Avenue and Citizen Koch were projects of the Independent Television Service, “the small arm of public television that funds and distributes independent films…ITVS, which is based in San Francisco and was founded some twenty years ago by independent filmmakers, prides itself on its resistance to outside pressure. Its mandate is to showcase opinionated filmmakers who ‘take creative risks, advance issues and represent points of view not usually seen on public or commercial television.’” These foundations represent a mission rather than a personal interest, and that mission is to create space and provide support for a range of ideas, rather than to advance particular arguments or worldviews. It’s a critically important role to fill, but it also means that those organizations have some disadvantages when they come up against the other funding model at stake here, in this case, the support of private donors.

As Mayer explains, in addition to his donations to Lincoln Center—where the David H. Koch Theater, home of the New York City Ballet, bears his name—” In the nineteen-eighties, he began expanding his charitable contributions to the media, donating twenty-three million dollars to public television over the years. In 1997, he began serving as a trustee of Boston’s public-broadcasting operation, WGBH, and in 2006 he joined the board of New York’s public-television outlet, WNET.” Unlike ITVS, for example, which is designed specifically to produce content for public television, there are a lot of places David Koch can spend his money. And unlike ITVS, which has an ongoing mission of making sure that new points of view make it onto public television, a setup that means it’s going to have to expend political capital on behalf of its filmmakers on a regular basis, private donors like Koch are more likely to concentrate their leverage on a few issues, or a few pieces of content. If Koch can make a “seven-figure donation,” which Mayer reported he had planned to give to WNET before he resigned from the board, contingent on two hours of programming, while ITVS has to fight for many films—PBS has already aired 15 movies through ITVS’ Independent Lens program in 2013—ITVS is understandably going to be at a disadvantage, as is the Gates Foundation, which may be all too happy to fund a single film, but doesn’t necessarily want to be in the postion to cover a multi-million dollar hole.
Read more

If you need a Sunday reminder that Hollywood’s critiques of Washington can be a little too pessimistic, check out this video of Robin Wright and my colleague at the Enough Project, JD Stier, talking about their work together in the Congo on Mitchell Reports with Andrea Mitchell:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

One of the most interesting things in Netflix’s adaptation of House of Cards was Wright’s performance as Claire Underwood, the wife of scheming House Majority Whip Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey). In a sharply-observed storyline, Claire ran a non-profit that was initially focused on cleaning up the Washington, DC watershed (something that’s a real-life issue), but that abruptly shifted its focus to clean water in Africa, a trendier cause, as Claire sought to consolidate her influence independent of her husband, even if it wasn’t what her organization best-outfitted to do. But even though that plot was a sharp critique of non-profit cause-shopping, Wright’s real-life work is a reminder that, unlike her character, not everything’s so grim in Washington. Now we just need to sign Wright up for a project that will let her be the dramatic equivalent of Leslie Knope, and remind viewers at home that there are efforts worth investing in.

In what appears to be part of a campaign to help revamp Tucker Max’s image while lessening his tax burden, the misogynist “fratire” writer attempted to donate $500,000 to Planned Parenthood so that the women’s health organization would name a clinic after him. Planned Parenthood rejected the donation last August, apparently while Max was on his way to deliver the check. Max claims that his donation was not a stunt and that he agrees with Planned Parenthood’s mission.

But Max has a funny way of showing that support — what with his offensive tweets about Planned Parenthood and jokes that demean women — and Planned Parenthood made the right move in deciding to not accept his money. Officials should know that a donor has the organization’s best interests at heart. Instead of showing that, Max has joked that he’s paid for so many abortions that Planned Parenthood should name a clinic after him. When Max announced he was retiring from writing about sex and partying, he said he still stood by everything he had said, presumably including the anti-women jokes. So it makes sense that Planned Parenthood would turn him down when Max offers to donate enough money for them to name a clinic after him. It’s not worth it for the organization to then owe something to someone who hasn’t shown that he’s thinking in terms of Planned Parenthood’s best interest.

And as Feminste points out, Planned Parenthood officials would have risked angering other donors or opening themselves up to attack if they had been a part of Max’s publicity stunt. “They decided to avoid the risk that comes from taking money from Tucker Max — because if they took that money, their broader mission could be even more severely impeded,” Feminste’s Jill writes. And yes, Texas Planned Parenthood clinics, where Max tried to donate, could use the funding after Texas Republicans cut off Medicaid funds to the clinics. But the risks that came with naming a clinic after Max were not worth it. Planned Parenthood spokesperson Tait Sye told the Huffington Post that the organization’s donation gift policy spoke for itself. “Like many nonprofits, Planned Parenthood reserves the right to decline offers of gifts and grants that may be discriminatory, are for purposes outside of our mission, or are too difficult to administer,” Sye said.

Months after Max tried to write a check for the group, his press strategist Ryan Holiday took to Forbes yesterday to attack Planned Parenthood for turning down the money and re-frame his client’s public persona. “Planned Parenthood did to Tucker exactly what the Susan G. Komen Foundation had done to Planned Parenthood,” Holiday writes. “Let perception and moral superiority and BS politics get in the way of their real mission of helping people in need.”

But Planned Parenthood is standing by its mission. By refusing to take Max’s money, Planned Parenthood showed it learned an important lesson after the Komen controversy: not to rely on people who may not have its long-term best interests at heart, and who have agendas of their own. The organization still has donors willing to support it, and it will continue to survive the latest attacks by GOP politicians without Max’s $500,000.

I ended up quite liking The River, ABC’s delightful piece of horror movie cheese about a reality show crew stuck on a boat in the Amazon searching for a vanished television star, which ended its first, and likely only, season last night. But I think that might be because I finally decided to read it as a show about a bunch of irritating white people (and one endearing gay, black cameraman, who informed his coworkers that his sexual orientation hadn’t come up on their trip because “I don’t go clubbing when I’m running away from ghosts.”) who got what was coming to them because they treated the Amazon as a mysterious place and ignored reasonable knowledge about the place that was available to them.

That’s really the core of the show: the main characters in The River treat the Amazon basin as a dark, mysterious place that can be made comprehensible by Western explorers who will approach it rationally. Rather than a place populated by, you know, actual people, it’s full of mysterious tribesmen, ghost ships, and cures for diseases that have a nasty tendency to zombiefy scientists if proper treatment protocols aren’t observed. Dr. Emmet Cole got himself in trouble in the first place when he strayed from his rational principles and started believing there was something mystical out there. That conviction lead him to take insane risks that endangered the life of his crew and his long-term friends, and also lead Cole into sin. His decision to abandon Jonas to a state in between life and death is reprehensible, the kind of thing that people who don’t happen to be pursuing wacky vision quests are relatively certain they’d never do.

But the truth is, for all the crew of the Magus are convinced that they can use logic and deduction to find Emmet, they’re awfully incurious people, by both the standards of Western rationality and beyond it. Maybe it wouldn’t serve the interests of the show to have them interrogate what in God’s name Emmet is doing in a giant chrysalis. But that seems like it might be a fairly relevant question to try to answer before he and Lincoln get to work on their mess of a relationship or he and Tess get all lovey-dovey again (if it were me, no matter how much I loved my missing husband, I would want to know what’s up there before I let him get near my lady bits).

And it’s deeply frustrating that, despite the fact that Jahel Valenzuela tends to be right about almost all the misfortunes that befall the Magus, and to have the power to summon resurrecting goddesses to boot, no one ever seems to have sat her down and done a comprehensive download on her knowledge of religion, folklore, biology, etc. The show’s getting somewhere in its critique of Western know-it-allism with scenes of scientists dissecting the native people of the region and keeping them in specimen tanks. But it’s not quite getting a central point. Emmet Cole might have had a better sense of a country that’s only Undiscovered to him and his ilk, and the scientists in that creepy lab might have increased the world’s store of knowledge more if they relied a little less on their own sense of their abilities, and tried a bit harder to talk to and learn from the people around them.

This feminist football fan will be hoping for a Patriots win, not least to honor the memory of Myra Kraft, who vetoed the team’s draft of a serial abuser of women, made her husband promise that buying a football team wouldn’t mean they’d cut down on their charitable work (they increased it, giving to causes that included closing the gap on health disparities and women’s health), and awesomely, proposed to Bob herself—on their first date.

That said, I remain anxious about Rob Gronkowski, and about history repeating. What are your predictions? Whoever’s closest on final score and throwing yards for the winning Super Bowl quarterback gets to make me write a post on a question or work of their choice.

The band, which has been active about fundraising for breast cancer since keyboardist Jenny Conlee’s bout with the disease, has decided to pull its support from Susan G. Komen For the Cure after that group made a clearly politicized decision to stop funding Planned Parenthood’s breast health work. Now, they’ll send the money they make from selling their Team Jenny t-shirts directly to Planned Parenthood’s Breast Health Emergency Fund. They’re not the only indie band taking action. The Mountain Goats, who are particularly politically active, warned their Twitter followers that “Pro-choice musicians, know that Komen for the Cure is now on the side of the bad guys.”

What’s particularly nice about the Decemberists’ action is that they’re not withdrawing the fight—they’re just giving their money to a direct service provider instead. Susan G. Komen for the Cure has a long list of bipartisan celebrity supporters, some of whom—like Neil Patrick Harris and Cynthia Nixon—have bigger national platforms than an indie band. Let’s hope some of them make the same decision, and help make it so Planned Parenthood is better off after losing Susan G. Komen’s support than they were before.

I appreciate the work that Susan G. Komen has done to make breast cancer a publicly discussable disease. But I also think that charities should have viable competitors to keep them honest. And for those of us who want a comprehensive approach to women’s health, and who want to give to a program that’s more about direct service and less about cancer culture and products, a reexamination of Susan G. Komen for the Cure is a healthy debate to be having and a spur to thoughtful philanthropy. It’s just too bad that Susan G. Komen for a Cure had to cut off aid to the women who need it most to get the conversation started.