There is a big merger in the works with the Meredith Corporation, and it’s parent company, Time, Inc. Meredith Corp. focuses on, and has access to, nearly half of the country’s women, and 70 percent of millennial women through magazine publishing, digital media, etc.
Meredith's National Media Group reaches more than 110 million unduplicated women every month, including 70 percent of U.S. Millennial women. Meredith is the leader in creating and distributing content across platforms in key consumer interest areas such as food, home, parenting and health through well-known brands such as Better Homes & Gardens, Allrecipes, Parents, SHAPE, Martha Stewart Living and The Magnolia Journal. Meredith also features robust brand licensing activities, including more than 3,000 SKUs of branded products at 5,000 Walmart stores across the U.S. Meredith Xcelerated Marketing is an award-winning, strategic and creative agency that provides fully integrated marketing solutions for many of the world's top brands, including The Kraft Heinz Co., Bank of America, WebMD, Volkswagen and NBCUniversal.
Meredith needs financial help to merge, and is being backed by the Koch Brothers. There is much speculation, chin-scratching, and eyebrow-raising, as the motive of the Koch Brothers in assisting the merge is unclear:
So it’s possible the Kochs are making a purely economic bet here and they believe a version of the pitch Time Inc.’s management has been making for years: We’re going to use our declining print business to build a new digital business. (Time Inc.’s digital ad revenues passed $500 million last year — a number that Time Inc. execs like to compare to BuzzFeed, which did about half of that in the same time frame.)
On the other hand, there are lots of rich, powerful men in the U.S. But there are only a handful of big, powerful media companies. If you’re trying to get your messages across to a lot of people, even a declining one might seem attractive.
The Koch Brothers, reportedly, will not have a board seat, and will not control the content of the company:
“Their desire to be passive and not require a board seat,” along with the financial terms of their investment, “without a doubt made the offer” from the Koch brothers “the most attractive” in terms of financing support available for the merger, Lacy said.
Rich Battista, who has been Time Inc.’s president and chief executive for only slightly more than a year, will leave the publisher after helping Meredith’s management with the transition, Time Inc. said.
People are postulating:
One indicator that the Kochs may view this as a passive investment: A source familiar with the deal says the brothers and their representatives won’t have a seat on the Meredith board.
The more important sign to watch: See if Meredith, which publishes titles focused on women and the advertisers who want to reach them, ends up hanging on to the titles it has traditionally been uninterested in — particularly Time and Fortune.
If Meredith — the publisher behind Family Circle and Better Homes and Garden — now decides it is interested in the news business it wanted no part of for years, it doesn’t automatically mean the Kochs plan on having an active hand in the news business. But it would be an obvious answer.
Here is a list of JUST food-related magazines, businesses, and the like that Meredith owns:
All Recipes (M)
Better Home & Gardens (M)
Coastal Living (T)
Cooking Light (T)
Country Home (M)
Country Homes & Interiors (T)
Eating Well (M)
Extra Crispy (T)
Family Circle (M)
Food & Wine (T)
Health (T)
Homes & Gardens (T)
The Magnolia Journal (M)
Martha Stewart Living (M)
Midwest Living (M)
My Recipes (T)
Real Simple (T)
Rachael Ray Every Day (M)
Southern Living (T)
Sunset (T)
Travel & Leisure (T)
Women’s Weekly (T)
Remember, the Koch Brothers are propaganda masters, having spearheaded several anti-electric car campaigns in recent years:
Link
This article about a new video sponsored by the Koch Brothers that attacks electric cars was first published on CleanTechnica
Not content to push America toward fascism and line their pockets with cash from fossil fuel enterprises that negatively affect the health of millions, the deadly duo of Charles and David Koch have reached down from the executive suite to order up a video designed to paint electric cars as evil, death-dealing machines. It must be fun to have so much money that you can subvert entire governments with devious schemes to make even more money.
And, they fund climate-change deniers:
The Koch Brothers have sent at least $100,343,292 directly to 84 groups denying climate change science since 1997.
University originated corporate-friendly propaganda:
Universities are the spine of Charles Koch’s lobbying model, which after four decades of finance has grown into an integrated network of professors, public relations agents, lobbyists, pundits, and politicians. Koch foundations started investing in campuses at an exponential pace, starting with just seven campuses in 2005.
From 2005-2014, Koch spent $109.7 million on 361 distinct campuses, according to Greenpeace’s updated analysis of IRS filings from Koch’s nonprofit foundations.
Charles Koch has long advocated for universities to advance corporate interests. Universities offer a sense of prestige and trust to Koch’s lobbying, serving to influence both current and future policy and regulation efforts. Universities complement Koch’s efforts to influence a long-term change in American culture, and to increase the ideological appetite for a low-regulation economy where negligent companies like Koch Industries are hard to hold to account.
Weaponizing philanthropy: (Janey Mayer, Dark Money)
One of their favorite methods, she said, is what she calls “weaponizing philanthropy.” This is a method, which I’m sure you’ve heard about, of exploiting loopholes in the campaign finance laws to set up organizations with names that sound like philanthropies but which have ways of injecting huge sums of money into political advertising. These methods, aided by Supreme Court rulings, have “exploded” just since 2013, to the point where Mayer estimates that for about two-thirds of all the money spent on political messaging, “you can’t tell who’s behind the spending.”
“Secret money in politics,” she added, is “an invitation to corruption.”
Over recent years, Mayer said, you can see the influence that these “weaponized philanthropies” are having in, for example, a growing number of Americans who say that human-caused global warming is not happening.
And, funding the Tea-Party seeds of origin: protesters, candidates, and now the Republican Party:
A Republican campaign consultant who has done research on behalf of Charles and David Koch said of the Tea Party, “The Koch brothers gave the money that founded it. It’s like they put the seeds in the ground. Then the rainstorm comes, and the frogs come out of the mud—and they’re our candidates!”
If the Koch Brothers are investing $650 million into a media company, chances are it’s not just for the stock profits.