At breakfast this morning a friend of mine - a confirmed lib, btw - was arguing that celebs should keep their noses out of politics, or at least not use their own publicity as a platform for their political ideologies. The idea was that they aren't any more expert on these issues than anyone else, so what business do they have hogging the megaphone?
I disagree, essentially on practical grounds, since there are all kinds of interests out there that have big ($$$) megaphones in front of them. But I think the argument my friend made really gets to the heart of the basic strutural contradiction between our political and economic systems - the founding prinicple of our political system is equality among voters, but our economic system makes specific use of inequality as an incentive for individual wealth creation. This contradiction is mediated by well established political institutions like freedom of expression and equality under the law, but it's no surprise that some of the most contentious issues in our history surround these institutions.
This underlying structural tension is especially great today. For one thing, income inequality is as great as it's been in almost a century, so there's an unusually large disparity between the amounts of money individuals (or corporations) have to throw at politics. But the problem is also compounded by technology that allows a single individual (or corporation) to take the issue right into your living room. The industry operating this technology, meanwhile, is increasingly regulated in the same way as other industries, which means it responds not to the political ideal of equality, but to the economic incentive for inequality.
According to another friend of mine who's in the field, there's almost no economic research on the subject of how the media's interaction with market forces affects a political system. This surprised me, because all the groundwork should be there - but I guess political economic models are kind of forbidding in terms of their complexity. It's too bad, because there's great need for some serious analysis on this point.
Obviously there's an economics at work with the media and politics. In PR, we use the idea of an "impression" to measure media campaign effectiveness. If 2.3 million people see a story about your client's event, new product, whatever, that's 2.3 milion impressions.
I think you could work up a model where impressions via political coverage and ads could be tallied and correlated with sheer dollar input by lobbyists to candidates and to media outlets.
There's no reason why a dollar to vote conversion couldn't be worked up into an economic model. Isn't a marketplace where votes and policy positions are bought and sold like potatoes and beer what our democracy seems to be devolving into?
Actually input to the political process via lobbyists has been modeled already, and presumably the marketing stuff you're talking about describes political advertisements as well as non-political ones.
I feel like what I'm talking about here is distinct from those things - it's specifically the problem that the media is a necessary tool for the people in a democratic political system, but it also responds to market pressures. So, how do market pressures lead the media to change what it's reporting, and how do any changes affect the democracy, which in turn regulates the media, etc.
Maybe I don't understand what you're saying here, but I don't see how could you ever 'model' the relationship between media-money and political/social power, at least in a 'global' way. I've been involved in some market research (I mean other than as a subject!), and there are always either implicit value judgements (what you choose to measure or consider) or a lack of value judgements, a passivity, which makes the 'research' kind of useless. Of course the market-research people believe in their little dials and multi-colored lines, but...how usefull are they, really? Only somewhat, at the most, I'd say. You must have been struck at one time or another at how social 'research' ipso facto tends to be overweening.
Money is always going to buy power, to some extent. But it boggles my mind that the prevailing 'wisdom' in the Supreme Court is that money = speech. Surely, money is a proxy for property, isn't it? On the other hand, I guess you could say that equality, while enumerated in the Declaration as an erstwhile core value, is not really a founding principle of the country in a strict sense (only (male) property owners could vote in the original America).
I don't mean to be a troll here, but the Democrat I support for Pres. is the only one (I believe) who has made the idea of taking money out of politics (full public financing; free and equal tv time) a standard part of his stump speech (I know it's on Dean's laundry list, too). Even if he were to win the Presidency, (and even if the Supreme's 'case law' wasn't what it is) it would be very very difficult for Edwards to pull off. But at least he takes it seriously, and talks talks talks about it.
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