Citizens Inundated report focuses on how money influences elections

The National Media Reform group Free Press just released a new report entitled, Citizens Inundated: How big-money politics and broadcast media are poisoning democratic discourse and undermining US elections.

The 11-page report looks at the long-standing trend of the amount of money spent on political ads during any given state or national election cycles. Filling the airwaves with political ads during an election cycle is not new, but what has changed since the Supreme Court ruling on Citizens United is that the amount of money being donated to political campaigns is resulting in an even larger increase in political ads.

The report is presented in three main sections: the Supreme Court decision and Super PACs, Broadcasters and the FCC and Views, Voters and the 1%.

In the first section the report states, “Citizens United unleashed a deluge of political advertising during the 2010 midterm election. Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group estimates that candidates, political parties and independent groups will spend up to $3.3 billion to buy TV ads during the 2012 election season. That’s a 57 percent increase over the estimated $2.1 billion that was spent on local ads during the 2008 presidential race.”

In the second section of the report we find information and analysis relative to the lack of accessible information from broadcasters on which entities is buying airtime and how much they are spending. The report talks about how the efforts to provide more transparency and get broadcaster to post online regular information on political ad spending is being resisted by both the broadcasters and groups like Committee for Political Truth, which is a 501c4 group that runs attack ads to influence elections.

The last section of the report addresses two major issues. First, it looks at how the amount of money going to broadcasters from political ads provides no incentive for broadcaster to do any serious reporting on candidates during an election. The other major issue in this section talks about how it is really the 1% of the population, the richest Americans, who give the bulk of campaign money, are determining the outcome of current elections.

“Money does determine winners and losers in U.S. politics. But that spending power is limited to the top one percent. In a November 2011 New York Times editorial, Harvard Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig reported that less than one percent of Americans give more than $200 to a political campaign, and that fewer than .05 percent give the maximum to any congressional candidate.46 “Campaigns financed by the one percent,” Lessig concludes, “will never earn the confidence of the 99 percent, or appear to any of us as anything other than corrupt.”

One conclusion to draw from this report is that until there is real and substantive campaign finance changes made the electoral process in the US will be a farce.

GRIID plans to provide some monitoring of political ads that air in the West Michigan market and how much money broadcasters are making from those ads between now and the November election. In the meantime, read this new report and share the graphic below, which visually communicates the unjust influence of money in elections.