Constitutional Amendments Say No

[peristaltor]

Some time ago, I asked the forum in the Friday Lulz tradition to imagine a world where money was excluded from the political arena. Few bit, most of those dismissed, probably for the same reason that people don't sit around dreaming of what the sky would look like green instead of blue.

Ah, it turns out (through NPR, of all places) that others

Comments

[peristaltor]

Accepting money is not the problem. Even smaller to middlin' bloggers get in trouble when they take money from companies and thenceforth blather on about the goodness of these companies without disclosing the connection. Accepting money is not the problem; how is.

I can also think of lots of podcasts that take only individual contributions, so do not resort to the potential conflicts of interest inherent in advertising revenues. Heck, lately I've been on a letter-writing campaign trying to get podcasts to at least offer ad-free content to paid subscribers, as long as the price was right. Broadband and servers for a one-hour program 'cast once a week costs NPR $.51 per subscriber. Let me give them $3 or so for the year. They would clean up, and I would suffer no ads.

Win-fucking-win.

The problem is obvious when you come to consider it. If too many people take that option, they suddenly start to see the world as a potentially ad-free place, a direct threat to the conventional business model that could lead to a tectonic shift in ad acceptance. Unacceptable!