At least one small slice of the American public looks forward to the non-stop, sleazy political advertisements set to inundate viewers during the 2016 elections: media executives and their investors.
Peter Liguori, the chief executive of Tribune Company, said earlier this month that the next presidential campaign presents “enormous opportunity” for advertising sales. Speaking at a conference hosted by J.P. Morgan Chase, Liguori, whose company owns television stations, referenced Super PAC spending as a key factor for why he thinks Tribune Co. political advertising revenue will rocket from $115 million in 2012 to about $200 million for the 2016 campaign cycle.
Vince Sadusky, the chief executive of Media General, the parent company of 71 television stations across the country, told investors in February that his company is positioned to benefit from unlimited campaign spending, referencing decisions by the Supreme Court. “We are really looking forward to the 2016 elections with spending on the presidential race alone estimated to surpass $5 billion,” Sadusky said, according to a transcript of his remarks.
In 2012, Les Moonves, president and chief executive of CBS, memorably said, “Super PACs may be bad for America, but they’re very good for CBS.”
His views appear unchanged. In a February investor call, Moonves predicted “strong growth with the help of political spending,” particularly on television. He added dryly, “looking ahead, the 2016 presidential election is right around the corner and, thank God, the rancor has already begun.”
In recent months, executives from media companies such as Nexstar Broadcasting, Gannett, and E.W. Scripps Co. have told investors that they are expecting a big jump in revenue from the 2016 political ad buys.
Listen to the Tribune Co.’s Liguori’s remarks here:
Listen to CBS News Corp.’s Moonves’s remarks here:
The New York Times and Bloomberg have chronicled the rising political revenue to broadcast media companies, a trend accelerated by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which effectively removed limits on individual, corporate and union spending. A single station in Columbus, Ohio, for example, “grossed about $50 million in advertising [in 2012], of which at least $20 million was attributed to campaign spending,” according to the Times. And the 2016 campaign cycle is expected to be the first time digital advertising alone will reach $1 billion, making big money groups a lucrative source of revenue for online publications.
Media watchdog groups worry that news outlets won’t investigate the special interests buying advertisements if their companies become dependent upon the same groups for revenue. Tim Karr, senior director at Free Press, compared six television markets over a set period and found “a near-complete station blackout on local reporting about the political ads they aired.”
Reliance on political ad spending has already led some media interests to fight against reforms designed to make the American election system cleaner.
For nearly two decades, the National Association of Broadcasters, a lobby group for media corporations, has fought bipartisan efforts to provide free airtime to candidates, a reform advocates say would reduce the moneyed barriers to political entry for candidates.
Such an idea was proposed by President Bill Clinton and was a key plank of the campaign finance reform legislation championed by former Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wisc., and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. But the NAB lobbied aggressively to kill the idea, eventually succeeding in stripping it out of the McCain-Feingold bill and pressuring the Federal Communications Commission to back down from pursuing the free airtime rule.
In a 2002 interview on CNN, McCain complained that the NAB is “the most powerful lobby in Washington.” Not only because they spend money on campaign contributions, but because “these are the people that shape the opinion to a large degree of the people who are your constituents,” McCain said.
Retired Sen. Robert G. Torricelli, D-N.J., lamenting “one of the great acts of corporate hypocrisy,” once said “the media that have been so critical of the campaign finance system should be ashamed that their own corporations are paying lobbyists to defeat meaningful reform.”
In more recent years, media companies have attempted to obstruct FCC rules promulgated during the Obama administration to digitize mandatory forms revealing information about political ad buys. Even that minor reform was too much. In addition to the NAB, News Corp., owner of the Wall Street Journal and Fox News; NBC Universal, parent of NBC News and MSNBC; and Allbritton, which owns television stations and Politico, were among the media companies to protest the 2012 rule, according to ProPublica’s Justin Elliott.
In spite of declining television advertising revenue expected this year, credit rating agencies recently gave broadcast companies a sunny two-year outlook. The reason, Carl Salas, Moody’s senior credit officer, told the Los Angeles Times, is that political ad spending is expected to boom next year thanks in large part to the Citizens United decision. “Political advertising revenue defies gravity,” Salas remarked.
(This post is from our blog: Unofficial Sources.)
Correction: The Los Angeles Times was spun off from the Tribune Company to Tribune Publishing in 2014.
Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty
Moonves isn’t wrong. Investing in media companies running national political ads the next 12-18 months should pay considerably more than just dividends. Advertising profits will be through the roof. It’s why the head$ of media will squash stories and even reporters for Big Brother and $tatu$ quo politic$…
‘While money doesn’t talk, it swears
Obscenity, who really cares
Propaganda, all is phony’
Bob Dylan summed it up quite a while ago.
The relationship of the media to the political economy is that of 1930’s Mob management of major political organs regionally from Detroit to Cleveland, but this layout is a global family operation, now. Dry cleaning and entertainment, slingshots. Who can help you bust a union strike one month and then put you up to wage increases for their sucker members or your blast furnace goes boom? The Mob.
Accordion to Hoyle, youz jokers are in on the take, too! You have to be; others wise, no pipes for you, Danny Boys!! You must pay someone protection money…
Go build your own networks. Or not to be.
For fracks sake, B Walters marries Lorimar Productions? Talk about keeping it in the family. You knew Lew, didn’t everyone? CLEVELAND! Bonanza? Aye, Sonora, you guys haven’t got a glue. Watson must be spinning in circles, trotter. Stop huffing, you stupid program! Puffing might help.
Lee, I want to congratulate you for having your article shared by the fake-left Bill Moyers (of Moyers and Company). It’s interesting to see what articles from the Intercept are highlighted, and which are suppressed. So for instance, the many excellent pieces on FBI entrapment receive no attention by Moyers. Similarly, Greenwald’s piece, “Syria Becomes the 7th Predominantly Muslim Country Bombed by 2009 Nobel Peace Laureate” wasn’t shared by M&C. Nor was the piece critical of the charlatan Martin O’Malley (whom Moyers had tried to pass off as a genuine populist). And of course the pieces on Saudi Arabia aren’t touched by M&C.
It seems that the pieces which reinforce long-promoted superficial analyses and pseudocriticisms by Moyers — the idea that the problem is “too much money in politics”, or that “journalism is failing” for example — get picked up and given wider circulation. But not those which challenge orthodoxies or illusions that the ruling class intellectuals want to keep the public blinded with. It’s very interesting to see the pattern and to ask why: what is the criteria that M&C use when deciding what to share and what to keep out of their audiences’ awareness, and who benefits from this careful selection?
Look, we have an opportunity now that we haven’t had for about 3 generations, and that is to tax or outlaw the sale of human attention. Companies that buy ads buy attention, not time. The purchase of human attention has been central to our economy. Once it muscled free communication out of the way, we became consumers and no longer citizens, at least in the minds of those powerful enough to see us as a whole. They could be confident that people would accept the rape of our attention because through it brands emerged, creating charmed objects that made daily life familiar and palatable for many, especially the young. The reason I see an opportunity now is that brands are losing their strength. People use social media now, and that means that wherever they go, a familiar world goes with them if they carry a device. So they don’t feel the need to communicate with and read others’ branded clothing. Look at what’s happening with Abercrombie and Fitch, Urban Outfitters, and the like over the past two years and you’ll see, visually in their charts, the breaking of brand strangleholds on us. The companies that are making money in clothing sell it at high discounts; their business models don’t require the purchase of so much attention, which is probably a good thing since a large part of the population is losing purchasing power.
Which brings us to political ads. If you study the branded businesses you can understand why media firms have come to rely on revenues from political campaigns. Political organizations have stepped in where consumer brands had been, not just purchasing vast amounts of human attention, but purchasing it at much higher prices than the overall market would otherwise support. It is a strange, strange thing we’re witnessing. So what can we do? The least risky thing is to work with your friends and simply decide not to watch, read or listen to media funded by the sale of human attention. A pox not just on Fox but also on MSNBC, CNN, the networks, Clear Channel and similar others. What to do in their place? Look for media that try to finance their operations through subscriptions, like NPR and hopefully, one day again, religious media, or are subsidized by entities that do not need our attention as they give money to support journalism.
A riskier and likely frustrating strategy would be to simply begin to notice what the sale of human attention is about and what it leads to. As we work for change, lets target the sale of attention directly. Find politicians, for example, who are fed up with constantly having to raise money. They will be terrified at first with the prospect of offending the attention vampires, but if we can show them a steady decline in attention being given to commercial media, and a rise in support for alternative media (and by alternative I mean not in content but in funding), we should begin to recruit politicians to the cause, and even to elect some new ones.
All that wasteful political spending, when people just need to find who they’re closest matches are via sites like http://www.ontheissues.org … rather unfortunate we have so many low information voters in America that rely on passive TV ads to learn about their candidates …
are you out of your mind? The political spending isn’t wasteful, not from the ruling class perspective. Also, newsflash: anyone who thinks that “candidates” are “theirs” or that voting is an effective means of getting out of our crisis is the very definition of “low information”.
watch this great interview of Chris Hedges by Abby Martin (host of RT’s Breaking the Set)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frMArY91HpU
This was a story just waiting to be told. (Remember how the NYTimes used to own the local TV station in Des Moines?)The other question that need to be discussed is the slew of stories where a reporter doesn’t even bother to call anyone at all, but instead uses only stuff found on the one or two press releases that might be released on the topic. This creates not an article, but a “Haunted House” filled with disembodied people who won’t allow themselves to be interviewed. Geez, these reporters must be low on self-esteem to not feel powerful enough to get the CEO online for a brief chat. One repeat offender is Janet Cho of the Plain Dealer in Cleveland, who help create Potemkin Village after Potemkin Village. (But maybe she is an intern, or has no journalism degree. Who knows anymore. The Plain Dealer has also cut its daily distribution to 4-5 editions a week, I think.
To expand on the idea that media amounts to a money laundering operation: All they show are drug ads, at least during the “news.” These ads could be made illegal again, and the savings could help lower healthcare costs, but the Auction House got the legislation done so that pharma could advertise and the media that could criticize is silent as it takes their money. Between drug ads, selling wars and selling congress, media is truly independent of any role that would serve the public, yet the watchdogs are silent.
Media has played a shameful role in the destruction of our country, from cheerleading financialization to lying for war. Originally stations were licensed to serve the pubic interest. Remember fairness doctrine that required giving opposition pubic time to rebut? Now media is basically a money laundering operation: it takes money to defend the superior rights of the groups it takes money from. The news is a joke. Media is just another check cashing operation in the Auction House that is our Congress. And the Court played right along, pretending that it doesn’t see how the citizenry has been shut out of political power.
We know this. But the question is when and how can we overthrow this tyranny?
Seems to be a good week for peeking here. Nice cluster of fracks, roughnecks.
We need to get money out of politics by ending legalized corruption. Please consider joining a voting bloc at votingbloc . org
I quote (close) Small Town Reporter from another comment section. “Anyone on here who votes Republican or Democratic is a fucking idiot.”
Thank you for putting it so well.
Money talks, and we don’t have enough to even whisper.
Reporters have been told not piss off Kock Brothers Media Inc.
It may take a billion or two to whitewash the slime: http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/04/13/80658/ I don’t mean to say that Hillary Clinton is any worse than the others. This is what our country has become.