Politics & Power Quote by Robert McChesney

McChesney’s line lands like a dare: if you want to know why American politics stays expensive and porous, look past the usual villains and toward the people who profit from the spectacle. Naming the National Association of Broadcasters as the top opponent of campaign finance reform is a strategic reversal. Broadcasters are culturally coded as referees of democracy - the neutral platforms that “inform the public.” McChesney yanks off that mask and recasts them as a trade group defending a business model.

The intent is less to indict individual journalists than to spotlight an incentive structure. Campaigns spend obscene sums on TV ads; stations and networks collect the rent. Reform that caps spending or shifts money away from paid media doesn’t just threaten a political strategy, it threatens a revenue stream. The NAB’s posture becomes legible as self-preservation dressed up as free speech principle - a familiar move in U.S. political argumentation, where economic interests often launder themselves through constitutional language.

The subtext is corrosive: the “marketplace of ideas” is also, very literally, a marketplace. If broadcasters are among the biggest institutional winners from the current system, their influence isn’t limited to what they air; it extends to the rules that guarantee the ad buy keeps flowing. Context matters here: this critique sits in the post-Citizens United era, amid spiraling ad budgets and media consolidation, where the line between civic infrastructure and profit engine is thin enough to monetize.