Investigative Reporting Workshop

This is the main overview story of our findings from a two-year study of the political, educational, and charitable presence of Charles and David Koch. During the five-year period we studied from 2007 to 2011, the total giving from the Kochs and their private foundations exceeded $134 million. The Koch Club was published in conjunction with Jane Mayer at The New Yorker, picked up by The Huffington Post, Esquire’s politics blog, and Salon among others, and was written up by the Columbia Journalism Review as a reminder to political journalists that campaign committee fundraising continues to be marginalized.

As the primary author on one of our two sidebar stories, I wrote about the No Climate Tax Pledge created by Americans for Prosperity. Helped by the wave of Republicans elected in 2010, the pledge grew into a large voting bloc in the House. Jane Mayer of The New Yorker wrote about our study and focused on the climate pledge aspect of our lengthy project.

To be transparent and open about our study, I wrote a methodology in the style of the Center for Public Integrity’s methodologies. As a public service, we uploaded and made available all 436 IRS 990 forms that were at the heart of our look into the political and charitable giving of Charles and David Koch. We documented the data sets used in our two-year study with links. We detailed our methods, any peculiarities in the data and our rationale behind major decisions.