Big Media & Corporatocracy: Don't Touch That Dial

With well over two years until Election Day, it’s unsurprising that no potential presidential candidate has officially declared.

Announcing this early in the cycle would be a ballsy proposition. Politics-centric media speculatively cover a four-year campaign season. And, between midterms, their collective spotlight adopts the scope of a laser pointer.

In past weeks, Hillary has become less a subject and more a victim of media attention. Many outlets, having soured on the idea of another President Clinton, have published articles and run segments questioning her executive aptitude.

Hillary has, consequently, seen her lead in preliminary polling slowly diminish. The latest Quinnipiac poll of Iowa voters puts her at 44% to Chris Christie’s 36%, down from 48:35 in mid-March.

Recently commandeering the onslaught on Hillary from usual suspect Fox News, the Washington Post and Politico separately scrutinized Clinton’s attempts to downplay her and her husband’s estimated nine-digit net worth.

Reluctant to criticize Hillary, however, has been CBS. The company – whose controlling shareholder and board chair, Sumner M. Redstone, also heads National Amusements – has largely abstained from negatively portraying Clinton. (Even a June 24 article titled, “Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton Shouldn’t Pretend to be Poor,” reads more like advice than criticism.)

Not coincidentally, National Amusements contributed $219,304 to Hillary’s 2008 campaign, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. This amount exceeds contributions from Wall Street firms, like Merrill Lynch, with whom Clinton is a purported bedfellow.

The extensiveness of Hillary’s ties to national media corporations is further quantifiable by the collective amount of campaign dollars media companies generated for her in 2008 (744,823 before General Electric’s 157,621) in relation to that of Wall Street firms (2,078,238).

The Media and Wall Street’s collective contributions account for .4% and .9%, respectively, of Hillary’s total 2008 campaign funding. Moreover, the contributions from both sectors, together, amount to just over 13% of the debt Clinton faced after the primary.

From a macro-political perspective, however, Clinton’s 2008 campaign funding was hardly unordinary. During the 2013-2014 election cycle, the ratio of political donations to Democratic candidates between the Finance and Communications sectors was 2.38:1 ($65,104,746.08:$27,410,151.83). Applied to Hillary’s campaign, that ratio drops only marginally, to 2.3:1.

All the above known, it’s hard not to question the extent to which media manipulate elections: is media bias a corollary effect of campaign finance or vice versa?

The notion of media covertly undermining the political process is especially unsettling in the post-Citizens’-United America, wherein corporations and those who run them have successfully siphoned any and all remaining political influence from the average voter.

As corporate influence drags America further down the rabbit hole of oligarchy, we are guaranteed to see increased polarity within the news media industry and continued legislative stagnancy on issues concerning the 99%.

Rest assured, though, you can still choose which channel you want to watch.