Robert Parry: Media reform is much more important than campaign finance reform

[eridani]

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/062308.html

So, even as campaign-finance reform sought a rough parity between the money available to candidates Gore and Bush, there existed a great disparity in the investments that the American Right had made in media compared to the American Left.

In effect, the Right’s lavish investment in media over the past three decades – building a giant, vertically integrated media apparatus reaching from newspapers, magazines and book publishing to talk radio, TV networks and the Internet – has represented the greatest infusion of unregulated spending on politics in American history.

Conservative foundations, like Olin and Scaife, and wealthy right-wingers, such as Sun Myung Moon and Rupert Murdoch, have poured billions and billions of dollars into this media infrastructure in a conscious strategy to shift American politics rightward.

Meanwhile, American progressives find themselves with almost no media infrastructure to speak of: essentially, a few under-funded magazines, Internet bloggers and some struggling talk radio operations, like Air America.

As this imbalance took shape, progressive foundations and well-heeled liberals set as their priority a disproportionate investment in campaign-finance reform.

So, while the Left spent its money trying to regulate political finances, the Right expanded the political playing field by building an ideological media, a year-in/year-out, 24/7/365 operation that has given birth to the “permanent campaign” of endless attack politics.

The Democrats and progressive can wring their hands over this development, but it has given the Republicans and conservatives a huge advantage. The Right's only vulnerability has been a tendency to overreach.
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Still, even after President Bush’s first-term power grabs and deceptions had alarmed many Americans, his supportive right-wing media gave him a big edge over his Democratic rival, Sen. John Kerry, in Campaign 2004.

In summer 2004, while Kerry was hamstrung by campaign spending limits, a pro-Bush attack group, the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth, smeared Kerry over his Vietnam War record – devastating themes that were amplified not only by Fox News and right-wing talk radio but which echoed through CNN and other mainstream outlets.

In other words, progressive-backed campaign-finance reforms effectively held Kerry down while a pro-Bush attack group and the right-wing media beat him up, aided further by elements of the mainstream media, always trying to shake the “liberal bias” canard.

[ixion]

1. Media reform could (in theory) cause the other, not vice versa

The thing is, the "reformers" don't want to reform it because it works in their favor at the moment.