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]

The message of the ad itself is speech. I have no problem with that. The medium of ads in general have a formative effect on the sponsored.

For example, when Toyota came under press scrutiny for problems with the cruise control system in some of its cars, it retaliated against ABC by having its dealers reduce their ad spending to the network affiliates "because of what they consider unfair coverage of Toyota safety problems by ABC News."

Toyota only had to do this for one month and to one network for all the networks to get the message: We pay your bills, so watch your step.

This is only one fairly obvious example that is known, but the trend can be seen in what commercial media outlets report and fail to cover, and in the spin and framing different stories are given. It's rare, for example, to see exposé pieces (like one used to) on industries which heavily advertise on stations, especially car dealerships. Likewise, before gas shot through the price roof, coverage of electric and alternative vehicles was slim and misleading in these local news markets, probably because these vehicles threatened the business model.

Oh, and let's not get started on news outlet ownership conflicts of interest. For example, how much coverage did GE's legal failure to pay taxes last year get on the NBC Nightly News? Zero.

One can extend this to politics easily, since all the successful candidates to major offices spend lavishly during the campaigns. How they are covered may have a direct effect on how much they spend. I should look to see if anyone has done such a comparison between ads and coverage. That would be interesting.

It's why I roll my eyes and laugh when the declaration that mainstream media is "liberal" gets bandied about. Mainstream media is beholden to their advertisers; what those advertisers allow - scrutiny on the government (they don't advertise, after all), fluff pieces on celebrities - can hardly be described as "liberal."

In the case of ads, the message is formed by the medium. When money changes hands, the message often changes.

[jerseycajun]

If your solution to the political angle is to ban political ads, then I presume your solution to the corporate one is to ban advertising.. full stop? Publicly fund the networks, cable television, and any other significant media outlet?

Because there's so much less of a chance that conflict of interest will arise when the fourth estate is funded by the political estate? How far are you planning to go with this idea, in the end?

[peristaltor]

This is not a polar situation of one verses the other.

I think there is a vast chasm of opportunity to be explored between the current commercial ad model of funding and the taxpayer funded model that used to be PBS's model.

Thanks to technology, one can collect funds for deployment in so many different ways it boggles the imagination, yet few if any of these ways have been explored (except in podcasting, perhaps).

I am saying the current situation is held hostage by tradition and competing business models.

[montecristo]

Whim worship knows no logic. The people who support these kinds of things think it's clearly obvious where the limits should be and that there is a consensus, or even a unanimity of thought on the subject and that unanimity revolves around their own opinion. The pheomenon we are seeing here is Hayek's "Pretense of Knowledge" once it has seeped down to the personal level. They think there will be no abuses because they know what they want and what they mean and they do not see that anyone would disagree with them, or worse, abuse the power they propose putting in unaccountable hands. It's a kind of self-absorbed thinking that sees all opinion on law as being perfectly reasonable, provided it's theirs, and is incapable of conceiving of themselves being on the receiving end of an abuse of power...until it happens. There's no historical depth to these people. Whatever they want, today, goes, by golly! Limitless democracy is perfectly safe, as long as right-thinking people (like themselves) agree on something. Tomorrow, if they want something different, well, they'll just vote that in as well. If democracy makes a boo-boo, well, the mistake can always be rectified by democracy! Someone should tell the Weimar Germans about this principle. It is a child's understanding of democracy and the problem arises in the way the school system has crippled the average person's ability to apply reason.