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. . . and the Politics of Money is Easy
by
Norman Solomon
July
15, 2003
While
President Bush’s re-election campaign accumulates an unprecedented pile of
dollars, the country’s news media are deep in a rut of reporting about the race
for the Democratic presidential nomination. With the next national Election Day
scarcely 15 months away, most signs point to a new triumph for the politics of
money.
Rather
than focusing on the positions being taken by Democrats seeking their party’s
nomination for president, the media spotlight often stays on the amounts of
money that those contenders have raised -- as if the importance and validity of a campaign can be gauged by
the size of its bank account.
A
recent CNN interview with one of the longest-shot candidates, Al Sharpton, was
a painful indication of how extreme the media fixation on campaign coffers has
become.
“We know that the fund-raising reports for
the first half of the year, these reports to the Federal Election Commission,
are coming in,” anchor Judy Woodruff said. “Howard Dean appears to be at least
on top in the second quarter; $7.5 million he raised. And we’re told that in
one day alone, at the end of the quarter, he raised $800,000, one day alone. Rev.
Sharpton, in the entire quarter, so far it’s been reported that you raised
$80,000, about a tenth of that what he raised in one day. My question to you
is, are you even serious about raising money in this campaign?”
During
his response, Sharpton was clear: “We’ve reduced American politics too much to
fund raising. Yes, I think money is important. But I think that you judge races
based on who can bring people to the polls. ... I think that when we start
acting as if money alone determines democracy, that we’re undermining the
principles of a people’s democracy.”
Unwittingly,
Woodruff came up with a retort that was even more damning of the prevalent
media mindset. “I understand what you’re saying about it shouldn’t be based on
money alone,” she replied. “But, Rev. Sharpton, at this early stage, money is
clearly one serious indicator, measure, of where these candidates stand.”
To
political reporters, the truly credible candidates stand on mountains of money.
Like Woodruff, most journalists assume that we shouldn’t take a campaign
seriously unless it has serious money behind it -- a self-fulfilling attitude
that simply postures as realism.
Meanwhile,
in politics, after years of ballyhoo about “campaign finance reform” and the
banning of “soft money,” the power of bucks is greater than ever. While turning
off -- with great fanfare – the prodigious spigots of “soft money,” the recent
McCain-Feingold law has boosted the importance of direct “hard money.” An
individual can now give $2,000 to a campaign, twice the previous limit.
“Political observers believe Bush’s network
of fund-raisers, along with campaign-finance rule changes that work strongly in
Bush’s favor, will likely allow the president to overwhelm any Democratic
opponent with an unchallenged flurry of spending,” the ABC News website notes. And:
“Some expect the Bush campaign may raise a record $200 million, largely through
individual ‘hard money’ donations, before the election is through.” That would
be about double what the Bush campaign raised for the 2000 election.
Journalists
should focus a great deal of attention on political fund raising. But the usual
reportage does little to expose the power of money in politics. News stories
routinely tote up the dollars without explaining which financial interests are
writing the checks, what those interests stand to gain, and whether the
candidates already have a record of serving them.
And
often the coverage has the effect of magnifying the power of money by equating
financial accumulation with legitimacy. As a campaign unfolds, when the press
hypes candidates because they’re “first tier” in fund raising, it’s part of a
pernicious cycle: Reporters tout the candidates who’ve raised millions of dollars,
and the media hype causes more checks to be written for those candidates, who
then are taken all the more seriously by news media because they keep raising
millions...
Of
course, few low-income people write four-figure or three-figure donation
checks. And Election Day comes long after the money primary has winnowed out
the presidential field of contenders. The campaign finance system may have been
“reformed” -- but it remains deformed.
Norman Solomon is Executive
Director of the Institute for Public Accuracy (www.accuracy.org) and a syndicated
columnist. His latest book is Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell
You (Context Books, 2003) with Reese Erlich. For an excerpt and other
information, go to: www.contextbooks.com/new.html#target. Email: mediabeat@igc.org
*
The 45-minute video of Norman’s appearance on C-SPAN “Washington Journal” a few
days ago can be seen at: http://video.c-span.org:8080/ramgen/gdrive/iraq_wj070603_solomon.rm
(or via direct link at the top of www.accuracy.org)