Good for Radio. Bad for America?

Like many, I was stunned by the Supreme Court’s gratuitous decision to remove limitations on corporate advocacy spending during political campaigns.

Broadcast interests and analysts are busy counting the money; certainly, the battered broadcast industry can use every scrap of good news, and I for one would not for a moment suggest that anyone stand on principle—not that we could, legally, anyway. But we need to see beyond self interest in all cases, or we become part of the problem.

In that spirit, I am of the opinion that this is an improper, impractical extension of the legal notion that a corporation is a person, with all the attendant rights and responsibilities of citizenship.

What’s significant here is the amount of money that major corporations can bring to bear on political causes they favor or oppose. This is good news for broadcasters—especially TV broadcasters, to whom most political dollars flow anyway. But it’s extremely bad news for those among us who cling to the notion that ideas deserve more than sound-bite treatment. . .that an examination of facts and motivations should inform our votes more than hot-button, often illogical—if not downright false—rhetoric.

We’ve come a long way from the high-minded reasoning put forth to justify the Lowest Unit Charge rule of the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971: In order to qualify, as we all know, the candidate must appear in the ad—the implicit argument at the time being that the candidate would use that opportunity to express ideas and positions. Well, we all know how well that has worked out.

But this week’s court ruling offers no such alleged benefit to the populace, however specious. It is a straightforward opinion that corporate interests are under fire and deserve the opportunity to fight back. It neatly side-steps the commonly-held view that modern corporations usually operate solely in their own interest, with little or no social conscience.

Politics has become all about the money. Nowadays more media attention is paid to how much a candidate has raised than to where the candidate stands on the issues. Our system of government has quietly morphed from a democracy (well, technically a representative democracy or a republic—Google it) to an oligarchy—defined by Wikipedia as “a form of government in which power effectively rests with a small elite segment of society distinguished by royal, wealth, intellectual, family, military, or religious hegemony.”

Viewed in that light, all the Supremes did this week was take one more step away from rule of the people. In the midst of perhaps the biggest political mess of my lifetime, it might not be the worst thing that’s happened to the American people lately. But it sure doesn’t help.