The Ombudsman of the Washington Post, Patrick B. Pexton says that his paper should not have republished the Bloomberg Markets magazine expose of Koch Industries:

The story was about illegal or questionable business practices by Koch subsidiaries dating back to the 1990s and earlier. The Post story, shortened from the original, describes Koch company activities that include bribing foreign officials in Africa, the Middle East and India to get contracts; selling petrochemical equipment to Iran (legal at the time); being found liable for a pipeline explosion that killed two teenagers in Texas; falsifying records about the amount of oil pumped from federal and Indian lands; and misreporting the amount of benzene emissions at a refinery.

It all looks pretty bad, and it is, on many levels. Koch companies paid hundreds of millions of dollars in fines and settlements to resolve these cases, no small change.

But I think The Post erred in republishing this story, or at least in the way it did. And when the Kochs complained to The Post after publication, The Post’s response wasn’t handled well.

Pexton concedes that Koch Industries bribed officials, traded with Iran; neglected a pipeline so badly that it exploded and killed two teens; falsified records to steal oil from the U.S. Treasury and Indian tribes, and pumped vast qualities of untreated benzene into the air and lied about it.

Pexton admits it all looks “pretty bad.” He goes on to say that, as far as he can tell, it’s all true:

Now, I couldn’t find any outright falsehoods in the story that would warrant corrections. Bloomberg, too, has published no corrections. But I think the story lacked context, was tendentious and was unfair in not reporting some of the exculpatory and contextual information Koch provided to Bloomberg.

His main objection is that the reporters didn’t remind readers that Koch Industries isn’t the only flagrant law-breaking corporation out there, not by a long shot:

As Indiviglio and Rubin wrote, lots of companies have foreign subsidiaries that until recently did business with Iran, including GE, Hewlett-Packard and Caterpillar. Many multinational companies have been investigated and prosecuted for violations of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and been fined and prosecuted for violating clean water and clean air laws.

Are the Kochs worse, better or in the middle? We can’t tell from this story.

For Pexton, adequate context requires a precise accounting of where Koch Industries stands in the grand scale of corporate wrongdoing. That’s an ambitious project. We can’t know for sure how bad Koch Industries is until we’ve looked at all the other companies.

As the original story notes, the Kochs have been champions for the rights of all corporations to bribe, steal, pollute, and endanger innocent people. For all we know, some firms have imitated, or even surpassed the masters.

The ombudsman of the Washington Post is calling for a forensic audit of the capitalist system. Talk about burying the lede.

The Post should immediately allocate all necessary resources to conduct a complete audit of corporate malfeasance, in the interest of providing full context. The Ombudsman has spoken: The Koch Brothers deserve it! 

[Photo credit: AMagill, Creative Commons.]