JOHN HINDERAKER: Bloomberg: Legitimate News Story, or Liberal Smear? “For more than a week, it has been rumored that Bloomberg Markets is preparing a hit piece on Koch Industries. Mark Tapscott of The Examiner wrote on September 19 that ‘[a] couple of Bloomberg reporters have been digging dirt on the Kansas brothers who own one of the world’s largest private corporations.’ According to Tapscott, Bloomberg is looking into an incident several years ago in which employees at a Koch subsidiary in France were found to have made illegal payments overseas, which violates Koch policies, but is not, unfortunately, uncommon in many parts of the world. . . . What is striking about the emerging outlines of the Bloomberg story is how non-newsworthy it appears to be. Employees of a Koch subsidiary in France were caught making illegal payments in 2008, and therefore were fired by the company. Is that news?”

More media battlespace preparation. Or perhaps the creation of a failure narrative: Obama lost because of those mean libertarian billionaires!

UPDATE: Reader Barry Dauphin writes: “I suspect that the Bloomberg piece on the Koch brothers will also be reported on by the usual suspects, cue NPR. The report will go into all of the seemly details for 95% of the piece, told in an ominous voice, hinting that this is simply the tip of the iceberg. Right at the end, they will mention that the employees were fired, as if an unimportant afterthought. The theme will be corruption in the Koch brothers world, even the the actual details could suggest a theme of sticking to company principles and firing folks who violate them. It will be designed to gin up outrage among contributors during pledge week. Hey, maybe they can even figure out a way for Nina Totenberg to do the piece, just to emphasize the righteous indignation at the evil Koch brothers.”