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by cmurf
2521 days ago
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If deregulation were to remove barriers to market entry for small competitors, it could. But big businesses are among the first to demand regulations: a. so they can say they were fully compliant, as a kind of certification and absolution by their sovereign; and b. so they can erect barriers to competitors. The vast majority of law and regulations in the U.S. are written by industry trade groups, lobbyists. A huge part of the media depends on the massive advertising component of lobbying, both direct and what lawmakers end up spending to reach constituents. We're way past time to take this seriously, but alas most conservatives had exactly zero problem with Citizens United, actively arguing in favor of the idea that corporations are persons, that money is speech, and corporations have free speech too and therefore can spend essentially unlimited money in the political system via advertising their positions totally disproportionately to the intent behind individual free speech. What we have now is an aristocratic concept, more money more speech. More money, more say. More money, wider broadcast of opinions and propaganda. Individuals should be having these conversations and debates using critical thinking rather than inundated with corporate talking points delivered into our lives via devices that we pay for. I think a company can issue unlimited press releases saying whatever the company wants to say. But the amount of money they get to spend on political, policy, and perhaps even social advertising, should be limited. |
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The foundational problem is this. Media companies like CNN and The Wall St Journal are corporations and their business is talking about politics. What does it even mean, then, to restrict how much money they can spend on it? How do you even measure the value of being able to choose which anchor with which viewpoints gets which timeslot, or which story goes on the front page? Or being able to just not report on stories (like media consolidation) that they're not interested in people knowing about?
But if buying a TV network to get airtime for your viewpoint is speech then so is buying airtime from that TV network.
The solution to this isn't to restrict corporations from saying things. It's to make sure that everybody else gets to say things too. So that's things like public financing of elections, and decentralized social networks (in the style of email) so that nobody gets to gatekeep information.
Make it cheaper to reach voters without corporate sponsorship and you erode the corrosive utility in corporate sponsorship. Making it more difficult only does the opposite and makes it worse -- nobody wants Zuckerberg to have the power to determine the President with an algorithm.