Greenfield: Rise of the Mediacracy

Yes, but is your root motivation the desire to possess those things or the status and adulation you would acquire by having them?

Motivations are not always so easy or certain to be sure of, but I would say that my root motivations are neither status and adulation or desire for possession, but rather to accomplish what I want to accomplish.

I have to add, that my assumptions did not include great amounts of hard work. I assumed that the money was there to be spent, and I did not have to work to get it. I was merely illustrating that it is easy to come up with ways to spend money that many could consider useful, fun, or interesting.

Were Carnegy’s libraries produced with the same motivations as the Pyramids, or might they be of genuine desire to improve the lot of the American people?

I think you both miss the point.

It is about money, but in a different way. The media is a leech on politics, sucking the money from the people who become our government.

Campaigns are very expensive, and they end up becoming a wealth-redistribution scheme that nobody talks about. Candidates take donations from corporations and people, and then hand much of those donations over to the collective "media" in the form of campaign advertising, i.e., ad buys on regional and national television and radio stations.

Look at what happened to Newt Gingrich in Florida. Mitt Romney blanketed the state in negative ads for weeks between the South Carolina and Florida primaries. While the Republican candidates were slandering each other, the "media" was laughing all the way to the bank.

And don't get me started on the Senate campaigns. Those are 33 of the most expensive elections that occur every two years. If we repeal the 17th amendment, we eliminate 100 elections over a six year period, and we eliminate all of that wealth transfer from candidates to the "media."

-PJ

You make some good points, but strongly disagree about:

If we repeal the 17th amendment, we eliminate 100 elections over a six year period, and we eliminate all of that wealth transfer from candidates to the "media."

No, all we'd do is transfer the money and the corruption to the state legislature which would then elect the senators. State legislature elections used to be to a considerable extent proxy elections for federal senator. Witness the Lincoln/Douglas debates. The senator would be elected by the legislature, but the senatorial candidates traveled the state debating each other for the national election.

The problem, as always, is the influence of government on business. As long as government controls whether a business is able to make money or even survive, businesses will strive to influence it. Any CEO who chose not to do so would violate his moral obligations to his stockholders.

The more government is incapacitated from shading laws and regulations to provide a competitive advantage for one business over another, the less a business will be incentivized to try to influence the government.

That’s just the media’s income from SNAP redistribution. Numerous other programs also take saving and investment money and redirect it to the consumer spending that media profits from. The ‘War on poverty’ has destroyed the wealth of the nation but the media has profited hugely from it. The Democrats get media favor because they pay for it.

Sure, Sherman’s point is good. Ads with beautiful girls next to cars, cookie-buying mothers surrounded by loving children, the Marlboro Man riding the range all show this point. Salesmen make their wages on the fact that people have non-fiscal motives for their purchases and actions.
But it’s the ‘sellee’, not the sellor, whose motives are described by him. The sellor (and his advertiser) is in it for the money.

I don’t know why I have such difficulty getting the point across that redistribution is big money for the media. Maybe there’s a media conspiracy against me... that’s most people’s explanation for the media’s favoritism towards Democrats.

I don’t disagree with most of what you say.

However, I think you overstate the media’s incentive to favor redistributive police. That incentive exists not for all consumer spending, but only that portion of consumer spending generated by redistributive policies.

Take food. While SNAP spends $80B a year (I will assume your numbers are accurate), it’s not like this is “new” spending on food. Quite obviously, some considerable majority of this would be spent on food if SNAP did not exist. They would still have to eat.

SNAP mostly allows people to spend cash on other stuff they would otherwise have had to spend on food.

Advertising dollars in mass media will always be aimed at consumer items, since trying to sell locomotives or architectural services in this way would be immensely expensive for the tiny percentage of the audience that is a potential buyer.

You seem to think that this is a bad thing. I'm not so sure.

First of all, the corruption is contained to the state, where it belongs. If all politics is local, then let the locals deal with it by voting in or out their own corrupt politicians. At least it makes them pay attention to the down-ticket races.

Second, even if the local politics is corrupt, at least each state is looking out for its own interests. That's not the case with the conversion of the Senate to a bloc of national party interests. Why do the Democrats in the Senate vote lock-step for the party on all legislation, while Republicans splinter and cower to pressure all the time? I don't think we would see this if the states controlled the Senate, no matter how corrupt the state-by-state Senatorial selection processes may be.

And third, back to the original topic point about money and power, campaign "warchests" are fungible today. Long-time secure Senators like Chuck Schumer still raise millions of dollars each campaign cycle, but they then donate their own donations to other Senate candidates. This creates a patronage system within the Senate, where junior Senators become beholden to the senior Senators, who then become the enforcers for the national party bloc interests. If we eliminate the Senate elections, we take away this power structure within the Senate.

That's not to say that some new power structure would emerge, but it won't be based on campaign funding and doling out money for favors. And it won't be based on a redistribution scheme that transfers Senate campaign funds from the people to the media.

-PJ

In 2008, the Mediacracy elevated an Illinois State Senator who had briefly showed up in the Federal Senate to the highest office in the land. They did it even though he had no skills for the job and no serious plan for fixing any of the country's problems. They did it to show that they could. They did it because they wanted to tell a compelling story and inflict radical change on a country that would have never voted for it, if it had not been lied and guilted into making the single worst decision in its entire history.

I would think that this paragraph alone makes the case that the media is a fifth column, not a "fourth estate." Their boy is now in charge, and playing Santa Claus. Constitution? We don't need no stinkin' constitution.

The destruction of the country continues...

5.56mm

The media made (in round numbers) $3 billion in the 2012 election and $1- 2 billion in the 2010 election- the most ever. Over that same 4 year period the media made $32 billion from just the SNAP food stamp reditribution scheme. About 10% of food costs go to advertising and SNAP spends $80 billion a year. so SNAP provides 7 or 8 times the ‘fiscal motive’ for the media than campaigns do. That’s a huge ‘influenece on business’. That’s just the media’s income from SNAP redistribution. Numerous other programs also take saving and investment money and redirect it to the consumer spending that media profits from.

Even if the direct profit motive from elections is smaller than from other engagements from other government programs, it's still a symbiotic relationship. The media supports those candidates that favor programs that will kick back money to the media.

Take the food stamp program again. I remember Rush Limbaugh talking about how food stamp enrollments late in the Bush term were so low that the federal government was considering advertising on the radio to boost enrollment, rather than see this as a sign that people are either more interested in being self-sufficient or they are getting their charity elsewhere.

If you were a media special-interest, would you rather promote a candidate who supports a growth in faith-based charities (or secular foundations) to feed the poor (who don't advertise on radio), or would you support a candidate who wants an increase in government spending to advertise increased enrollment in government programs?

So, the media get their money coming and going. They profit from the campaigns, and then they profit from the actions of the elected government officials.

It's one thing to say that our media is only interested in supporting liberal left-leaning candidates (to the point of rabidly despising right-leanding candidates), but that is mostly the "boots on the ground" journalist mind-set. The exectuive elites in the media are also motivated by the profits and special access they get by supporting the candidate and then receiving the payback once elected.

-PJ

“SNAP mostly allows people to spend cash on other [advertised consumer] stuff they would otherwise have had to spend on food.”
Precisely- ALL of it goes to spending that the media gets a cut of for advertising.
The same is true for housing assistance, heating assistance...ad infinitum.
Some of redistributed money ends up in investment (SS payments for example can allow some recipients to maintain savings instead of having to spend them) but mostly they are spent.

The money is redistributed from wealth creating activity- that the media gets no advertising revenue from- to consumption. ( I’m reminded of that poor senator who was ridiculed for saying “there’s too much consuming going on!”.

So the media’s approximately 10% cut ( which corresponds to a salesman’s commission for moderately difficult sales) of redistributionist policies strikes me as very strong incentive to support those who favor the policies.

Of course I don’t mean to make this a “philosopher’s stone” of media behavior. But I do find it impossible to ignore- yet everyone, like the good Sultan Lnish, does.

Sure, appointment of Senators would have much benefit and the states are diversified enough now that corruption would not be the issue it was.
Plus it would end the national media’s overwhelmng influence upon these elections- but it’ll never happen.

Boy, the national media can drain a Senatorial candidate’s campaign chest with one manufactured hit piece. And make a tidy profit doing it!

The national media have not been able to affect the campaigns of Representatives. IMO that’s why we have a good number of conservative (anti-reditributionist) House members.
I expect the media to make an all-out efffort to do so in 2014 though. A constant generic anti-Tea Party attack combined with specific attacks on some candidates. It will be interesting, the media have a lot of money at stake.

Two hundreds years ago, a few friends could open a printing press and take on the big behemoths and often did. Today the only place they can do that is on the internet.

It is my considered opinion that the internet is by a factor of 100 more powerful than printing presses. What we conservatives lack is the will to organize our own media system and realize the dream of citizen journalism. We have conservative opinion writers on the 'net by the hundreds, all writing the same thing. Any of us could easily write such stuff.

What we don't have is real conservative "reporters" and "journalists" who report on events, meetings, state houses, city halls - and then systematically publish that news. THAT'S how credibility is built, and then readership. We have to become the news source of choice for the masses.

We have the tools and it can be done.

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