Soren Dayton, a GOP operative and executive at New Media Strategies, is reported to be the contact for Koch Industries at NMS. Reached by phone yesterday by ThinkProgress, Dayton exclaimed, “I’m not going to talk about this, thanks,” before hanging up. Lyndsey Medsker, a senior account director for NMS, spoke to ThinkProgress today. She explained that NMS also maintains the Koch Industries Twitter page, Facebook page, and has an active team working on promoting Koch Industries in the comment section of blogs and news websites.
As ThinkProgress has reported, the billionaire Koch brothers maintain contracts with over a dozen public relation firms and lobbying firms. Pushing back again recent scrutiny, the brothers have also relied on a conservative media infrastructure owned by the Koch brothers or closely linked to them by way of their donor conferences. We have documented how the Koch message machine has targeted ThinkProgress and even placed hit-pieces against a New Yorker journalist investigated the Kochs. But now it seems the Koch brothers are at work manipulating Wikipedia to polish their image.