Heightening Public Awareness of critical issues. The herb alpert foundation, supporting organizations Whose Mission is to promote compassion and creativity in our society. The bernard and audre rapoport foundation. The john d. And catherine t. Macarthur foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. More information at macfound. Org. Anne gumowitz. The betsy and jesse fink foundation. The hkh foundation. Barbara g. Fleischman. And by our sole corporate sponsor, mutual of america, designing customized individual and Group Retirement products. Thats why were your retirement company. Welcome. Whether you were pleased or not with how your candidates and issues did in last tuesdays election, the amount of money spent on many of the campaigns had to leave most people more dispirited than ever about our politics. In two states, local referendum battles were won by outside corporate interests pouring money into tv ads. In Washington State alone, 22 million was spent to beat back a plan to label genetically modified food. And across the country in maine, a ballot motion to stop the building of a tar sands pipeline terminal was thwarted when Oil Companies pumped in hundreds of thousands of dollars to defeat it. Democrats and some forces on the left have embraced the corrupting kiss of cash as well. In virginia, liberal billionaires, including environmentalist tom steyer, shelled out millions of dollars to elect Terry Mcauliffe as governor. Mcauliffe himself is the celebrated bagman, the cronyest of crony capitalists, whose chief mission as an adult has been to raise multimillions of dollars for other politicians while enriching himself. And as Republican Chris Christie was handily being reelected governor of new jersey, democrats spent millions trying to hold down his margin in the hope of wounding his expected race for president in 2016. But between now and then, we still have the 2014 midterm elections to further line the pockets of the political class. So, heres how you can prepare for the next avalanche of Campaign Cash read this new book, dollarocracy, by john nichols and Robert Mcchesney. John nichols is washington correspondent for the nation magazine and a pioneering political blogger. The late gore vidal said, of all the giant slayers now afoot in the Great American desert, john nichols sword is the sharpest. Robert mcchesney is one of our leading scholars of communications and society, a professor at the university of illinois, the author or editor of 23 books, and according to utne reader, one of the 50 visionaries who are changing your world. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Great to be here. Dollarocracy. What does that mean . Well, democracy means rule of the people, one person, one vote. Those are the powers, the demos. Dollarocracy means the rule of the dollars. One dollar, one vote. Those with lots of dollars have lots of power. Those with no dollars have no power. So, elections are the one time people have an opportunity to come in and select whos going to control the government, really weigh in on what the policies will actually be. Its the one moment of real leverage citizens have. And we think whats happened in the last generation, and especially in the last decade, is the power of citizens to act as an effective force has been reduced to the point of near elimination. So, why rub our nose in it . I mean, everybody, as ive said in the opening, knows it. Knows that money and media are destroying our elections, as you say. Why another autopsy . Well, this isnt an autopsy, this is the product of three years of work. Bob and i are political junkies. I mean, theres no other way to say it. We love politics. We love covering it. We love talking about it. And we feel a sense of loss. We feel a sense of loss in america, where our elections are no longer these great battles of ideas, but, in fact, very controlled events, managed events. And so after the Citizens United ruling of 2010, which essentially freed up corporate money to flow into politics, we knew that this is a big enough pivot point that we should step back and spend the next few years looking at how an american president ial election and all the elections beneath it play out. And so we looked at the 2012 cycle from start to finish, over a three, four year period. And what we determined was that we didnt know much at all about how bad it wasp. So instead of the 6 billion that all the News Headlines said was spent on the 2012 election cycle, it was actually more than 10 billion because most of the groups that analyze it dont look at state, local and referendum elections. And we also brought i think something very different to this. Were saying that, as you have this inflow of money, this huge amount of money flowing in, we also have the stand down of journalism. We have lost tens of thousands of journalists. Newsrooms closing down, newspapers cutting back. The worldwide web has not filled the void by any means. And so we have a situation where massive inflow of money and the check and balance of journalism declining. You end up with almost a perfect situation for propagandizing the American People, from managing their debates into a narrow zone where those with the money will invariably prevail. Let me be particular for a moment. Look whats happening to local television stations. In just the last few months Gannett Company offered 1. 5 billion for the 20 local stations of the Belo Corporation based in dallas. The Tribune Company 2. 7 billion for 19 local stations. Sinclair broadcast group, which is the nations biggest owner of stations, 1 billion for seven more stations. One analyst calls it a renaissance of the local television business. He says, its the best its been in a long time. More Big Companies buying more local news stations. But is it good for the country . Well, the fact of the matter is that what has made local Television Boom in recent years is political ads. That 10 billion we talk about, roughly 6 billion of it goes into political ads. These folks arent buying those stations because we really want to help democracy. Theyre buying them to make money. And political advertising. Among other things. But heres one of the things we chart in the book that just absolutely blew our mind. In the 2012 cycle there were local stations in big battleground states where they actually shaved minutes off the local news so they could fit more ads in. In one circumstance we looked at a situation where they expanded in one circumstance set aside local news. And youre, like, great. We had this intense election. You must really want to tell us more. No, they expanded it so that they could get more ad revenue because citizens go to the local news to find out about politics÷ but when youre shaving the newscast, when those citizens show up to get information, the informations coming from the ads, not from the news. Yep. And there are many countries in the world, the scandinavian countries, for instance, which they basically ban political ads. They allow Party Election broadcasts, which are very structured. Because . Because they say, at the time of an election, people need news and information, not, you know, some sort of managed statement from candidates that might actually cause them to think badly about the other candidate. I think this is something that most americans, because, are unfamiliar with if theyre under the age of 65 or 70, that our elections werent like this for the first 170 years of American History, prior to the 1960s. And even in the 1960s and the 70s, the amount of political tv advertising was much smaller for campaigns. So, there were only a handful of ads that were negative, relative to the lions share of tv candidate ads, which were positive and about the candidates. But increasingly, theyve become more and more negative over time, to the point that by 2000 roughly half of them were negative. And i think we havent seen the final tally for 2012. But probably 85 , 90 in that range of ads were negative we know that in some Key Senate Races almost all its way over 90 p. In some cases closer to 100 . The closer the race, the more negative ads you see. Trying to demolish the other, your opponent. And also, turn people off. Basically all youre getting is messages that are telling you that candidates are horrible from either side. Its going to make people not want to participate. What were doing is squeezing the en. qqergy, the hope out of our politics and making it a drudgery for citizens. Politics shouldnt be drudgery. Im never as angry about 9n anything as i am about people who blame the American People for whats wrong because the fact of the matter is, we have very, very wealthy people who spend a lot of time with very, very smart people trying to figure out how to manipulate and manage our politics so that it is negative and ugly and a drudgery. Norway just had elections a couple of months ago. They had around an 80 turnout. Germany just had what they said was one of the most boring elections in their history and they had around a 72 turnout. In 2012 in an incredibly intense election, 53 of america voted. In 2010, when republicans swept to power 37 participated. Were getting the measure of whats happening. People are opting out. One of the antidotes should be journalism. And we all know whats been happening to newspapers and magazines. So, is there any real competitiveness left in commercial, serious commercial journalism . The commercial basis of journalism that weve understood for the last century thats produced vast fortunes and household names is dying. Its dying rapidly and its not coming advertising supported journalism . Advertising, commercial journalism. Advertising supported. And this has only become clear in the last few years. And its a point that cant be exaggerated. As advertising is going online, its not supporting websites that do journalism like it supported magazines or tv shows or newspapers. Instead, they go through digital ad networks, run by Companies Like google and microsoft and aol and yahoo that basically you buy your demographic. And they find people wherever they are on the web. They no longer have to go to a website and support the websites content production. As a result of that, the commercial journalism model is online is nonexistent. It really theres no hope for it. And it changes everything because it means now were accustomed to a certain number of reporters, a certain number of news media to have a functional democracy. Well, its disintegrating in city after city. We talk to journalists, we go into city after city and we say to old timers, we say, how many paid reporters are there in your city today, editors, reporters. Include sports, weather, the works. Editorials function compared to a generation ago in your city . And theres not a single city i can think of where anyone said that theres, you know, at least half are gone. And this includes digital. So, were including anyone whos making a buck online. And sometimes its much lower that, especially in small cities, its like a playing that has hit the city. Theres just hardly anyone covering the community. That means theyre not covering elections, theyre not covering the relationship of government to commercial interests. All this has disappeared and its not coming back. You know, as we travel around and as we look at the reality of how our media system is developing, one of the things you realize is that Digital Media and the internet is a rapidly evolving zone. And you say, well, how do people make money there . Well, how do they make money on the internet . Boy, its hard, right . They struggled in all sorts of ways to do it. But one of the things they figured out is when you gather all this data on people, when you really find out a lot about them, then if you crunch that data, if you mine it right, you can figure out where theyre at and you can follow them online. This is the key to it. In the old days, you open up a newspaper, theres an ad there. I may not want to look at that ad, but as the story kind of winds around it, i may notice it. Television, im watching it. The ad pops up. Im not, im too lazy to get up and walk out, so i watch that. Radio in the car, the ad comes on, i hear it. In the digital world, they dont have to put the ad on the page that im looking at. They can go right to me. They can track and follow me as i go from place to place. Even when you buy an ad, right, lets say you buy an ad on a digital news site, the big reward for designing, you know, that ad and where you go to is when somebody clicks on the ad to go look at a coat or some shoes, you make the next site so exciting that they never go back. And so, we have effectively created a situation where advertising on the web is designed to lead people away from journalism, not to it. You remind me that when aol bought Huffington Post two years ago, the ceo at the time, tim armstrong, ordered the companys editors to evaluate all future stories according to the and im quoting profitability consideration. Translate that for us. What that means is that the commercial pressures on journalism today are so immense, that theyre, so finding ways to raise money, that the traditional standards of commercial journalism is that editors and reporters did their job well and they would automatically get an audience. And then the advertise people could sell the ads. And they didnt really have to have too much contact. There was sort of a separation of church and state, as the saying went, in news media. Thats disappeared. Now the reporters and the editors have to be every bit as cognizant of the commercial value of what they produce as the Advertising Sales people had to be. You must have seen this story that time inc. Has abolished the position of editor in chief. And the editors of all of times magazines will now report to the business side through a new senior content officer. What does that tell you . Well, what it tells us is times catching up with just about everybody else. And this is the painful reality. You know when broadcast media came into being and it was initially thought of as a service. You didnt expect to make a profit off the news. Well give credit to the folks at 60 minutes. They showed you can make money doing news. And so, now in broadcast media for a long time, news shows have been profit centers. Theyre supposed to make money. Theyre supposed to have a return. Weve seen this come into newspapers now. Newspapers are expected to return massive profits for their investors even in tough times. And the problem with that is that the least profitable stories are the ones for about working class people in tough neighborhoods, thats the old afflict the comfortable, comfort the afflicted journalism that we that i was trained in Journalism School was important. That doesnt fit into a profitability calculus. When jeff bezos bought the Washington Post for 250 million, what was lost in the story was that if hed tried to buy the Washington Post 13 years earlier he probably wouldve had to spend 5 billion, something in that area. And the reason is that the commercial wall street has decided you cant make money doing journalism anymore. Thats why we have so few journalists. And, you know, the reason bezos is interested in it was less for commercial reasons than for political influence. You still have great political influence when you own a monopoly daily newspaper, especially in the nations capital. Journalisms got to be understood first and foremost, as a public good. Its something society needs, but the market doesnt produce in sufficient quality or quantity. Oh, you dreamer, you. No, but wait. This is its not a dreamer. Advertising gave the illusion that journalism could be a commercial entity and the market would take it wonderfully. But it doesnt. Now that the advertisers are leaving, we can see that isnt the case. If we just rely on the market, we will not have journalism. But this isnt a dream. This is actually not just how other countries have figured it out, all the other most democratic nations of the world have large subsidies and investments in journalism. But this country was founded on that notion. We actually were the pioneers of understanding the importance of investing in a free press that is the founders . The founders. Yeah, yeah. The First Century of American History is all about Massive Public subsidies through the post office and printing subsidies to create the most diverse, dissenting news media ever known in the human race. Everybody says to us, whats the new model . Whats the new model for paying for journalism . As if, you know, theres going to be some sort of magical calculus that comes up. And over time, we came to the conclusion that the answers actually very simple we found the model, we got it, its established, its working, its very, very functional. Germany, norway, britain, all the countries with which we might compare ourselves all have massively funded public and community media. They make sure that there is an independent, nongovernment controlled, they create strong firewalls, the model is there, the problem is in the United States we have ended up in a horrible situation, where the basic questions about funding the journalism we the people need to know whats happening, to know how to be participants fully in our democracy, that we have debates in congress about big bird. And what we say to journalists and to citizens, to civic activists is we cant play this game anymore. We have to step up and demand massive funding. Meanwhile, the downward pressure, as you know, on wages and working conditions for reporters is accelerating. I talked to a young journalist, well, hes 40 years old now. He said, 15 years ago i could get by on 25,000 a year. I make 40,000 a year now and i cant im not able to do it. Were losing a generation of young people who desperately want to be reporters for the right reason, who really believe