Moonies, Messiahs and Media: Who Really Owns Newsweek?
IBT Media’s corporate leadership site lists two cofounders: Etienne Uzac, the company’s CEO, and Johnathan Davis, its chief content officer.
But some say that the company is actually controlled by—or at least has very close undisclosed ties to—someone whose name appears nowhere on the site: David Jang, a controversial Korean Christian preacher who has been accused of calling himself “Second Coming Christ.”
A story in The Tennessean about Olivet University, a university founded by Mr. Jang, lists IBT as one of Mr. Jang’s businesses. A deeply reported investigation into Mr. Jang’s church by the magazine Christianity Today also lists IBT as among Mr. Jang’s enterprises. (That investigation, incidentally, was named one of the “Best Long Reads of 2012″ by The Daily Beast, which had partnered with Newsweek.)
IBT’s two cofounders seem to have ties to Mr. Jang as well.
Before founding IBT, Mr. Davis was the journalism director at Mr. Jang’s Olivet University. Christianity Today reports that Mr. Davis, IBT’s ostensible cofounder and chief content officer, was invited but declined to take part in a meeting with leaders of Mr. Jang’s other businesses. Mr. Davis reportedly wrote an email stating that he could not take part in the meeting because, “My commission is inherently covert.”
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