‘Forbes’ Says Huntsmans Are Most Generous; ‘Harper’s’ Says PBS Whitewashes Programming

Although Karen and Jon Huntsman Sr. didn’t make Forbes’s annual list of the 400 wealthiest Americans, the Utah businessman and his wife are the most generous Americans when it comes to the share of their wealth they have donated, the magazine’s October 22 issue reports.

The magazine has pegged their net worth at $1.1-billion and says they gave $63-million in cash last year to nonprofit groups. Over their lifetimes, the couple have given 124 percent of their current net worth to charity, by Forbes’s accounting.

The minimum to land on Forbes’s 400 wealthiest list this year was a net worth of $1.55-billion.

Among those who did make the list this year as the most wealthy are, as in past years, Bill and Melinda Gates, followed by Warren Buffett.

The Gateses, in the No. 1 spot on the list, also hold the top ranking for charitable donations given in 2013, according to Forbes’s report. The Microsoft co-founder and his wife gave away almost $2.7-billion in cash to charity last year, while their lifetime giving, according to the magazine, is 37 percent of their total net worth of $81-billion.

Their friend Mr. Buffett gave slightly more than $2.6-billion in cash to charity last year, and the magazine says the financier’s lifetime giving amounts to 30 percent of his net worth, which is now pegged at $67-billion.

Forbes included only living donors and did not count money pledged. In addition, some of the 2013 donations included are payments made toward pledges announced in previous years.

To learn more, go to forbes.com, and see The Chronicle’s comprehensive report on the most generous donors of 2013, the Philanthropy 50.

A Harper’s Magazine essay on PBS pulls no punches in charging that the public-television network has pulled plenty of coverage. The piece accuses PBS of whitewashing its coverage to placate the corporate and political actors that control its purse strings.

The article, appearing in the October issue of Harper’s, opens with Boston’s PBS affiliate, which has been targeted by protesters demanding that the station remove David Koch, the conservative billionaire, from its board of trustees. It goes on to paint Mr. Koch as part of a right-wing strategy to neuter public television by policing its content, a shift from the early 1990s when conservatives attempted to yank federal support. “It doesn’t matter that the Republicans couldn’t defund PBS—they didn’t really need to,” the magazine writes. “Twenty years on, the liberal bias they bemoaned has evaporated, if it ever existed to begin with.”

PBS, it would appear, took the charges against it seriously. John R. MacArthur, Harper’s publisher, told multiple news outlets that the network has pulled ads from the magazine.

To read more, go to harpers.org.