Robert McChesney and John Nichols Want You to Help Break Apart the Media-Money-Elections Complex

Highlights from a discussion of their new book Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex Is Destroying America at the Ash Center on October 1, 2013.

By Tim Glynn-Burke

In 1888, the time of America’s Industrial Revolution and Gilded Age, President Rutherford B. Hayes said “This is a government of the people, by the people and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations and for corporations.” Some 80 years later the tide appeared to have turned. After decades of social progress from the Progressive Era to the New Deal to the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts — the influence wielded by corporations appeared to have weakened.

Too weak, as Robert McChesney and John Nichols tell it, so big business began to fight back.

On October 1, 2013, McChesney and Nichols spoke at Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation about the issues raised in their new book Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex Is Destroying America. McChesney is a professor at the University of Illinois whose books include Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy. Nichols is the Washington correspondent for The Nation and a frequent radio and TV commentator. To write Dollarocracy, the authors spent three years studying campaigns, elections, and money’s influence in politics.

The Rise of the Media-Money-Election Complex
Those whose economic positions were threatened by the expansion of democracy in the 1900s looked to find other means to control the political process. Corporations and business-oriented conservatives responded with a coordinated campaign that included:

• Calls to action including the Trilateral Commission’s 1973 report “Crisis of Democracy” which noted an “excess of democracy” in recent years and recommended “a greater degree of moderation in democracy.”
• Strategy documents such as Lewis Powell’s influential 1971 memo to the US Chamber of Commerce describing a strategy for promoting an intellectual and cultural environment friendlier to business, reinforcing a dominant role for business in our politics.
• New think tanks including the Heritage Foundation (founded 1973), American Legislative Exchange Council (also launched 1973), and Cato Institute (1977).
• Convergence on Washington, leading to the birth of K Street in Washington, D.C., and the ballooning of corporate lobbying.*

At the same time, the influence of money in politics was further enabled by the dismantling of campaign finance rules. One of the Powell Memorandum’s strategies was to push business-friendly appointments to the US Supreme Court; a position Powell himself filled one year later. The unraveling of campaign finance, and subsequent flood of “dark money” into politics, has continued for decades, with the most recent decision being the 2010 Citizens United decision under Chief Justice John Roberts.

Rounding out what they call the media-money-elections complex, the authors also blame weak journalism for enabling the influence of money on politics. Instead of watchdog journalism that is diverse, energetic, and combative, media has become a primary beneficiary of money in politics. As advertising moves to the Internet, political advertising has become a critical revenue source for television. And the television that voters watch includes less reporting and coverage of politics; some elections for major office receive zero local coverage. This appears to be a consequence of both the will and the means. The collapsed demand for traditional media like television and newspapers has resulted in the loss of thousands of newspaper writers and staff, local radio stations, and political and investigative reporters.

Shorenstein Fellow and long-time public servant Michael Copps, who introduced the authors at our event, said of Dollarocracy, “I call this the book of the year. It is the result of a tremendous amount of scholarship, a lifetime of learning, and lots of good judgment.” Watch a video recording of the Democracy Seminar with McChesney and Nichols above.

Consequences of a Dollarocratic System of Governance
The result of having lifted the major constraints on the influence of money in politics is “dollarocracy.” Where democracy means “rule of the people” and is symbolized by “one person, one vote,” Nichols and McChesney argued that today’s dollarocratic system of governance is characterized by “rule of the money” and “one dollar, one vote.”

While money has always played a role on politics, McChesney and Nichols note the unprecedented volume and negative uses of money in today’s political elections. They estimate that $10 billion was spent in 2012 on national campaigns (including state and local elections could possibly double that number). Importantly, a large percentage of these billions are spent by corporations and the wealthy with the specific purpose of protecting their narrow commercial self-interest — more a business expense or investment than an act of civic participation. By comparison, according to Nichols, Norway does not even allow political advertising — or what they call propaganda. And, in its 2013 national elections, Germany spent $1 for every $32 spent in the US.

The consequences of dollarocracy include voter disenfranchisement and citizen disengagement, political inequality, corruption, and more.

Roughly $6 billion of the $10 billion spent in 2012 goes to political advertising, of which 80–90 percent is negative or attack ads. The authors noted that many democracies, such as those in Germany and Norway, do not have negative political advertising because it serves as a voter suppression mechanism — turning people off not only to individual candidates but to political participation in general. And certainly voter turnout in the United States is disastrously low.

The authors also noted Princeton Professor Martin Gilens’ new research on the relationship between economic inequality and political inequality — in essence, elected representatives respond almost exclusively to those constituents who are among the top 10 percent of income earners and ignore the other 90 percent. Anecdotally, Senator Bernie Sanders recently stated that he found it impossible to pass any legislation opposed by Wall Street, which has unofficial veto power over anything put before the Senate.

Finally, this flood of money can animate positions that were once politically dead: ideas like privatizing social security that were fatally unpopular or even rejected at the polls. A minimum of tens of millions of dollars have targeted the repeal of the Affordable Care Act even after it was voted into law and found constitutional by the Supreme Court. Nichols questions whether without money from the Koch brothers and others the ACA would have been enough of a lightning rod issue to shut down the federal government. Money allows the wealthy to manufacture political reality.

Possible Solutions?
McChesney and Nichols proposed three solutions. One recommendation was a constitutional amendment to get money out of politics. Nichols notes that of our 28 amendments, each was intended to expand democracy and each was critical to moving forward as a society. The time is right, they argue, for a new amendment to reinforce that money is not speech, corporations are not people, we have the right to organize a democracy that functions for everybody, everyone has the right to vote, and that each vote should be counted. While difficult to accomplish, Nichols notes that a movement is already growing behind the idea — Move to Amend (represented by two or three members of our audience that evening). A number of state legislatures and local governments have passed resolutions and petitioned the federal government to amend the constitution to get money out of politics.

A second suggestion advocated for media subsidies and other support for political reporting to help build back the watchdog role missing in today’s journalism. “People are in open revolt. People are ready to change this thing,” Nichols said. “But no one is covering their movement.”

The third and final recommendation was for citizens to get involved — a call to action echoed earlier by Copps at the start of the evening. “I will let them tell you a story which you need to know. I want you to listen to them. And when you leave here, I want you to ask yourself, what should I do? What can I do? I think you’ll find that you can do a lot.”

* The meteoric rise in lobbying is one of the root causes of the money-media-elections complex that McChesney and Nichols explore in their book. K Street lobbying firms recruit heavily from among elected members of the House of Representatives and Senate and from appointed officials and senior staff at federal agencies (in 1970, 3 percent of retiring legislators joined K Street; today over half become well-paid lobbyists in D.C. after retiring, earning middle to high six-figure salaries).

Originally published at www.challengestodemocracy.us.