I’ve always thought of her as a partisan hack, but it turns out that it’s worse than that. She is yet another bit of Koch brothers bought and paid for AstroTurf:

Megan McArdle is a Koch-trained conservative activist working as a business journalist and pundit. She earned her MBA from the University of Chicago, received journalism training at the Kochs’ flagship libertarian think-tank, the Institute for Humane Studies, and has used her position at The Atlantic and, most recently, Newsweek/ The Daily Beast, to run cover for and promote Koch interests and the Republican Party agenda. In early 2009, a GOP outfit backed by the Kochs hailed McArdle for her “leadership role in … re-branding the Republican party.” McArdle continues to conceal the extent of her deeply conflicted relationships with the Koch influence-peddling machine.

There is a line between being a hack, and being a wholly owned subsidiary of the Koch brothers.

If you hire someone while they are paid agents of an entity that they cover, you are making the integrity of your news organization a joke.

I have made the same argument about NPR’s religion reporter, Barbara Bradley Hagerty, who interestingly enough is the sister of the multi-millionaire owner of MCardle’s employer The Atlantic, David Bradley. (The world is weird that way)

There are some good people at The Atlantic, but even before these revelations, it was clear that giving McArdle a megaphone was a blight on the magazine.