Dollarocracy (59 page)

81
. Quotes from Lawrence Jarvik,
PBS: Behind the Screen
(Rocklin, CA: Forum, 1997), back cover.

82
. Quoted in “ANA '84: Washington Update, Cost Concerns,”
Broadcasting
, November 19, 1984, 66.

83
. Tom McCourt,
Conflicting Communication Interests in America: The Case of National Public Radio
(Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999), 2–3; William F. Buckley,
On the Firing Line: The Public Life of Our Public Figures
(New York: Random House, 1989).

84
. Howard Kurtz, “McCain Wants Free Airtime for Candidates; Is Media Fair to Bush on Corporate Scandals?,” CNN Reliable Sources, July 6, 2002.

85
. Ibid.

86
. Some indication of the power of the commercial broadcasting lobby is that since 1934 there have been well over 100,000 license renewals but only four times has a broadcaster had its renewal denied because it failed to meet its public interest programming obligation. The odds are less than 4/1,000 of 1 percent that a broadcaster might lose its license. In short, it is a hollow threat, and broadcasters know they can do exactly as they please to maximize returns. See Steven Waldman and the Working Group on Information Needs of Communities,
The Information Needs of Communities: The Changing Media Landscape in a Broadband Age
(Washington, DC: Federal Communications Commission, June 2011), 26.

87
. Waldman et al.,
The Information Needs of Communities
, 295–296.

88
. Quoted in Cantor et al., “Free and Reduced-Rate Time,” 21.

89
. Robert W. McChesney interview with William Kennard, February 2001.

90
. Jeff Cohen, “TV Industry Wields Power in D.C.,”
Baltimore Sun
, May 4, 1997.

91
. McChesney interview with Kennard.

92
. Ibid.

93
. Ibid.

94
. Quoted in Todd Shields, “Broadcasters Fight Plan to Post Names of Political Ad Buyers on Web,”
washingtonpost.com
, March 18, 2012.

95
. Todd Shields, “Unmasking the Going Rate for Attack Ads,”
Bloomberg Businessweek
, March 26–April 1, 2012, 21–32.

96
. Jake Harper, “FCC Database Misses Huge Chunk of Ads,”
sunlightfoundation.com
, October 3, 2012.

97
. Katy Bachman, “Broadcasters Lose Attempt to Stay Political File Disclosure Rules,”
adweek.com
, July 27, 2012.

98
. Dan Gillmor, “A Strategy for Filtering America's Toxic Sludge of Political Advertising,” guardian .
co.uk
, August 18, 2012.

99
. For the Berg quotation and a discussion of these cases, see Timothy Karr,
Money, News, and Deception in Denver
(Washington, DC: Free Press, 2012), 8–9.

100
. Bill Knight, “Super PACs Spent Big in Peoria,”
thecommunityword.com
, September 4, 2012.

101
. Karr,
Money, News, and Deception
, 5.

102
. Knight, “Super PACS Spent Big.”

103
. Quoted in James Q. Lynch, “Broadcasters Urged to Demand Accuracy, Reject Deceptive Political Ads,”
Quad-City
(Iowa–Illinois)
Times
,
qctimes.org
, September 17, 2012.

104
. Confidential conversation between public interest advocate and Robert W. McChesney, July 2012.

105
. Quoted in Andy Kroll, “What the FEC?,”
motherjones.com
, April 18, 2011,
http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/04/fec-cazayoux-citizens-united
.

106
. Quoted in Charles Babcock, “Secret Election Financing Surges with Evasion of IRS Scrutiny,”
bloomberg.com
, June 16, 2011.

107
. Comment on
PBS Newshour
, August 10, 2012.

108
. Quoted in Tim Karr,
Left in the Dark: Local Election Coverage in the Age of Big-Money Politics
(Washington, DC: Free Press, September 2012), 6.

109
. Kathleen Hall Jamieson,
Dirty Politics: Deception, Distraction, and Democracy
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 279.

110
. Martin Kaplan, Ken Goldstein, and Matthew Hale, “Local News Coverage of the 2004 Campaigns: An Analysis of Nightly Broadcasts in 11 Markets” Lear Center Local News Archive, February 15, 2005, 19–20,
http://www.localnewsarchive.org/pdf/LCLNAFinal2004.pdf
. Moreover, control over the presidential debates has been taken away from the League of Women Voters by the two major parties, and the capacity for debates to work for citizens rather than politicians has been lessened accordingly. See George Farah,
No Debate: How the Republican and Democratic Parties Secretly Control the Presidential Debates
(New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004).

111
. John Nichols interview of Ed Garvey, November 2010.

112
. Classic research includes Daniel Halin, “Sound Bite News: Television News Coverage of Elections, 1968–88,”
Journal of Communication
42, no. 2 (1991): 5–24; Erik P. Bucy and Maria Elizabeth Grabe, “Taking Television Seriously: A Sound and Image Bite Analysis of Presidential Campaign Coverage, 1992–2004,”
Journal of Communication
57, no. 4 (2007): 652–675; and Kaplan et al., “Local News Coverage.”

113
. Thomas E. Patterson,
The Vanishing Voter: Public Involvement in an Age of Uncertainty
(New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 90.

114
. Leonard Downie Jr. and Robert G. Kaiser,
The News About the News: American Journalism in Peril
(New York: Knopf, 2002), 171.

115
. The research is discussed in Waldman et al.,
The Information Needs of Communities
, 84–85.

116
. Michael Schudson,
The Power of News
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 215.

117
. The research is discussed in Waldman et al.,
The Information Needs of Communities
, 84–85.

118
. Karr,
Left in the Dark
, 12.

119
. Editorial, “Tale of the Tape . . . So Far,”
Columbia Journalism Review
, September/October 2012.

120
. Elizabeth Wilner, “Why Pushing a Politician Isn't Like Pushing Soap,”
Advertising Age
, October 1, 2012. See also Elizabeth Wilner, “What Big Bird Teaches Us About Political Advertising,”
Advertising
Age
, October 11, 2012.

121
. Quoted in Daniel Adler, “Political Ads: Overpriced, Inefficient, Essential,”
RollingStone.com
, August 14, 2012.

122
. Andria Krewson, “Big Ad Spending, Little Press Scrutiny,”
cjr.org
, July 30, 2012.

123
. Karr,
Left in the Dark.

124
. Karr,
Money, News, and Deception
, 3.

125
. Edward Wasserman, “TV ‘Watchdogs' Quiet as Political Ad Cash Rolls In,”
Miami Herald
, October 8, 2012.

126
. Quoted in Dickinson, “Guess Who's Profiting.”

127
. “Little Public Awareness of Outside Campaign Spending Boom,” Pew Research Center for People and the Press,
www.people-press.org
, August 2, 2012.

128
. Jamieson,
Dirty Politics
, especially Appendix II.

129
. Quoted in Karr,
Money, News, and Deception
, 6.

130
. Darrell M. West,
Air Wars: Television Advertising in American Elections, 1952–2008
(Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2010), 94–95.

131
. Quoted in “In Election's Closing Days, Ad Campaign Urges Battleground Stations to Reject Deceptive Outside Group Ads and Increase On-Air and Online Fact Checking,” Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, October 31, 2012.

132
. Quoted in Jason Salzman, “Checking the Facts in Political Ads,” Huffington Post, August 27, 2012.

133
. Karr,
Money, News, and Deception
, 6.

134
. Quoted in Scott Finn, “Should TV Stations Refuse to Air Political Ads That Make False Claims?,”
npr.org
, October 3, 2012.

135
. Gillmor, “A Strategy.”

136
. Moyers and Weisberger, “Money in Politics.”

137
. Marty Kaplan, “How to Ignore the Campaign,” Huffington Post, August 31, 2012.

138
. “Yes, Expect Record 2012 Political Spending,”
Media Life
, June 23, 2011,
http://www.medialifemagazine.com/artman2/publish/AskaMediaLifeexpert/Yes-expect-record-2012-political-spending.asp
.

139
. Katy Bachman, “Digital Losing Out on Campaign Ad Billions,”
AdWeek
, June 22, 2011,
http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/digital-losing-out-campaign-ad-billions-132676
.

140
. Eli Pariser, The
Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You
(New York: Penguin Press, 2011), 154.

141
. Quoted in Bachman, “Digital Losing Out.”

142
. Gerald F. Seib, “Political Perceptions: Ad Burnout Ahead?,”
wsj.com
, September 11, 2012.

143
. Chris Kromm, “Did Big Money Really Lose This Election? Hardly,”
truth-out.org
, November 12, 2012.

1
. Quoted in Jeremy W. Peters, “A Finger Slips, and the Bachmann Camp Pounces,”
New York Times
, November 13, 2011.

2
. Quoted in ibid.

3
. Nina Mandell, “Bachmann's Campaign Manager Calls CBS Exec ‘a Piece of Sh—' After Debate,”
New York Daily News
, November 14, 2011.

4
. Herbert J. Gans,
Democracy and the News
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 54.

5
. Mike Miller, “Born Under a Cloud of War,”
Capital Times
, September 3, 2009; John Nichols, “Neglecting Candidates with Whom You Disagree Is Ultimate Disrespect for Democracy,”
Capital Times
, September 14, 2010. The
Capital Times
newspaper, for which Nichols has written for two decades, was founded by William T. Evjue, a crusading reformer, in 1917. It was Evjue who developed the “Let the people have the truth” motto.

6
. John Nichols, “A New Age for Newspapers: Diversity of Voices, Competition, and the Internet,” testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, U.S. House of Representatives, April 21, 2009,
http://judiciary.house.gov/hearings/pdf/Nichols090421.pdf
.

7
. The material in this paragraph and the material that is unattributed otherwise in the next few paragraphs come from Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols,
The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again
(New York: Nation Books, 2011).

8
. Alexis de Tocqueville,
Democracy in America
(New York: Penguin, 2003), 215, 604.

9
. It also meant that dissident movements found it far easier to launch weeklies and distribute them. See Bob Ostertag,
People's Movements: The Journalism of Social Justice Movements
(Boston: Beacon Press, 2006).

10
. See John Nichols,
The “S” Word: A Short History of an American Tradition, Socialism
(New York: Verso, 2011). See also Robin Blackburn,
An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln
(New York: Verso, 2011).

11
. Quoted in James M. Lundberg, “Nathaniel Hawthorne, Party Hack: Why Did the Famous Novelist Agree to Write a Campaign Biography for an Infamously Bad President?,”
Slate
, September 14, 2012.

12
. Richard L. Kaplan,
Politics and the American Press: The Rise of Objectivity, 1865–1920
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 42.

13
. Michael Schudson, quoted in Natalie Jomini Stroud,
Niche News: The Politics of News Choice
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 174.

14
. Quoted in Charles Lewis,
The Buying of the President 2000
(New York: Avon Books, 2000), 343.

15
. Kaplan,
Politics and the American Press
, 24.

16
. Ibid., 24, 149.

17
. Ibid., 77, 73.

18
. Quoted in ibid., 123–124.

19
. For the classic treatment, see Upton Sinclair,
The Brass Check
(Rpt., Urbana: University of Illinois Press, [1919] 2003).

20
. Robert M. La Follette,
The Political Philosophy of Robert M. La Follette
, comp. by Ellen Torelle (Madison, WI: Robert M. La Follette Co., 1920), 345–359.

21
. Ibid, 349.

22
. “History and Mission,”
The Progressive
,
http://www.progressive.org/mission
.