Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex is Destroying America
John Nichols
Language: English
Pages: 368
ISBN: 1568587074
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Blending vivid reporting from the 2012 campaign trail and deep perspective from decades covering American and international media and politics, political journalist John Nichols and media critic Robert W. McChesney explain how US elections are becoming controlled, predictable enterprises that are managed by a new class of consultants who wield millions of dollars and define our politics as never before. As the money gets bigger—especially after the Citizens United ruling—and journalism, a core check and balance on the government, declines, American citizens are in danger of becoming less informed and more open to manipulation. With groundbreaking behind-the-scenes reporting and staggering new research on “the money power,” Dollarocracy shows that this new power does not just endanger electoral politics; it is a challenge to the DNA of American democracy itself.
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result. That’s not good for journalism or for democracy. The decline of campaign coverage has been masked to a certain extent because the gutting of newsrooms has also encouraged what Herbert Gans described as the conversion of all political news into campaign coverage. As political campaigns have become permanent, so has campaign coverage. Political journalism has been subsumed into campaign coverage. So what journalism resources do remain are disproportionately devoted to either campaign
major parties as the costs of participation would be radically lower. In some countries, such as Britain, it appears that the Internet has been a factor in actually lowering the costs of national campaigns while they have skyrocketed in the United States. Not much of this has come to pass in the United States, primarily because this euphoria was based on an unrealistic and romantic view of the potential for digital technology to trump powerful economic interests.29 But this line of thinking
based upon the ignorance of the general population, which is largely clueless about the total lack of privacy online and, increasingly, everywhere. This system is also fueled, we might add, by the determination of political, consulting, and media players who prefer not to level with the voters they are in the process of manipulating for electoral and economic gain. To the extent citizens are aware, however, the authors conclude, “What we have is a major attitudinal tug of war—a political class
influence over the political process. In that same 2010 survey, 93 percent of Americans questioned said average citizens have too little influence.53 Yet far from embracing Powell’s suggestion that threats to democracy would merit reconsideration of the role of corporate money in politics, the Supreme Court has moved beyond Powell and far, far beyond William Rehnquist, who in his 1978 dissent from the Bellotti decision wrote: The question presented today, whether business corporations have a
was trying to unseat—an opening that challengers historically have sought. But Johnson, who scrupulously avoided interviews with newspaper editorial boards that might have given a sense of where he stood, refused the debate offer. Instead, he let his advertisements and those paid for by the Chamber of Commerce, American Action Network, and sundry organizations that flooded the state with anti-Feingold ads do his talking. Even when Johnson did participate in the three traditional candidate
