The Ellisons Taking Over Warner is Pants on Fire Stuff, but Team Progressive Just Whines

If I said, “Citizens United,” every card-carrying progressive would immediately yell that it let the rich take over elections. But if we ask how, the argument would quickly descend into gibberish.

Yeah, Citizens United lets corporations spend unlimited money on PACs. We get it.

So, the hypothesis is that if the money were instead in the hands of rich shareholders like Elon Musk and Larry Ellison, instead of the corporations, they wouldn’t be able to figure out how to influence elections?

I’ve never considered the billionaire crew to be great geniuses, but I also don’t think they are total morons. If the billionaires want to put people in power who will cut their taxes, remove pesky environmental regulations that cost them money, and weaken workers’ rights, they can figure out how to spend their trillions without using the corporations they control as intermediaries.

Elon Musk proved this back in 2024 when he spent close to $300 million to put Trump in the White House to give him tax cuts, government contracts, end regulatory oversight for his companies, and promote his neo-Nazi ideology. Musk didn’t need Citizens United to corrupt the election. A Supreme Court ruling from 1976, Buckley v. Valeo, said Elon Musk could spend as much as he wants to elect fascists.

The other part of outrage over Citizens United that makes little sense is the narrow view of how the rich influence elections, and this brings us to the Ellisons. The idea is that campaign expenditures somehow uniquely influence voting.

Surely spending on campaigns, both directly and indirectly, influences voting, but this is at most a small part of the picture. People are constantly getting political information about candidates and politics from the media and social media. Even in the extreme cases, the paid ads that they see or hear are a small part of the mix.

And in the most extreme cases, the paid ads probably end up being ineffective. Back in the 2012 election, I heard the identical Mitt Romney commercial four consecutive times on an evening news break. It’s hard to believe the third or fourth showing got Romney any votes. Furthermore, I was living in DC, which Romney had no hope of winning. But to reach a Virginia audience, a state he could conceivably win, he also had to pay to reach DC and Maryland, which he also had no hope of winning.

But campaign commercials do not have a magical influence on people’s voting behavior. The news that I heard before and after the Romney ads likely had more impact on my and others’ views on the election.

And this is where progressives are far behind the curve. The fact that the Ellisons can put right-wing hacks like Bari Weiss in charge of the news that people see between the campaign ads is a far greater threat to democracy than the 30-second campaign ads that the rich can buy in abundance.

They can use their control to make sure that viewers don’t hear about the torture prisons in El Salvador where Trump sends non-criminal immigrants. They can prevent us from seeing the innocent people shot in the streets of Minneapolis by masked goons sent in by the Department of Homeland Security. And they can promote Trumpian lies about an economic boom that only exists in Trump’s head or a Biden disaster that also has no relationship to reality.

This is not hypothetical; Fox News has been pushing an imaginary world to its viewers for decades. It now seems that CBS and possibly also CNN, with the Ellisons’ takeover of Warner Brothers, will go in the same direction. It is very plausible that we could get network news shows that will be nothing but variations of Fox News, with rightwing billionaires using their money to suppress any news of the world that runs counter to their political agenda. And this outcome would not change one iota if Citizens United was magically overturned.

We Can Do More Than Whine

People should recognize that the prospect of right-wing billionaires completely controlling the news networks is a pretty horrible. But we have to do more than whine. We also can’t just pray for a more progressive billionaire to step forward and buy some news outlets. It’s great that some billionaires are not fascists, but a progressive movement that relies on billionaires to lead is pretty pathetic.

My route to counter this trend is an individual voucher or tax credit that would give each person a sum, say $100, to support the news outlet of their choice. In principle, this could make tens of billions of dollars available to support non-fascist news. (Some of the vouchers would end up supporting fascist news, but so what, we already have that from Fox and now CBS.)

The great part to my mind is that it can be done at the state or even local level, since we know Congress would not do anything along these lines any time soon. And once we have a foot in the door (Seattle’s new mayor Katie Wilson is a big supporter), the policy could spread quickly, if it works.

I talk about the details more here, here, here, and here. The basic scheme can be sliced and diced in a thousand different ways. In my view, all the work supported through this route would be fully open without copyright monopolies. This means it would be free to the public. The logic is we pay for the material once with the credit, we don’t pay a second time by giving a copyright monopoly.

There also is the question of how broadly to interpret news. I would look to be fairly broad, since we don’t want a government board narrowly deciding that information it doesn’t like is not news. The model here is the I.R.S.’s treatment of organizations qualifying for tax exempt status. It doesn’t try to decide if a religion is a good religion or an art museum has good art, just whether an organization is a religion or an art museum displays art.

Anyhow, there may be other ways to support news that is independent of the billionaires, but this problem really should be at the center of progressives’ agenda. The rich are not so stupid to need corporations to do their political spending for them. And campaign ads do not have a magical ability to affect political views apart from everything else that people hear in the course of a day.

These seem like obvious facts. (Prove me wrong.) If we want to address political power in a serious way, we have to acknowledge them and come up with a strategy to deal with the world as it is. Yelling about Citizens United is a waste of time.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

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