The Election Industrial Complex: Ike’s Warning Still Applies
Big media are anteing up their contributions to a record-setting $16 billion dollar election. As for news reporting on the subject? Nothing to see here, move along.
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” President Eisenhower told Americans in January 1961 as he ended his eight years in office. “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
Eisenhower’s warning, the most famous lines from his farewell address, laid out the five-star general’s concern about a politically influential arms industry. Little wonder if Ike were here today what he would say about the millions of dollars from the media and technology industry pouring into lobbying and this year’s election campaigns.
Media moguls and their companies have long made political contributions. From William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer to Michael Bloomberg and Rupert Murdoch, the news barons and their modern-day CEO successors have regularly anted up. Hearst, for one, did anything but hide his hand or his favorites. “This is my newspaper,” he asserted in a front page editorial, “these are my views, take or leave it.”
Among the politicians on Capitol Hill and on the stump righteously calling out newsroom biases and tech company transgressions these days, the complaining chorus has remained remarkably silent on big media’s corporate check-writing. The same goes for the tech industry’s social media platforms. While decrying their alleged biases, the pols somehow never seem to mention the Silicon Valley set’s contributions to their political campaigns.
Sad to say, in looking at official records the facts don’t speak for themselves. The Federal Election Commission provides a picture of sorts of who gives what to whom. Harvard’s Future of Media project examined the FEC’s 2020 election data on 90 top news media organizations. The findings: “Only 14.5 percent of the 412 owners, executives, board members, and investors had made donations to individual candidates, traditional…(or) super PACs from January 2020 to August 2021.”
The FEC tabulations might reassure some, but there are grifters galore with bridges to sell anyone who believes the numbers for 2020 fully account for the media empires’ contributions to the $14 billion election campaign. Heidi Legg, the Harvard project’s lead researcher, made just that point. “We need radical transparency from media and social media platforms on which politicians, super PACs, and lobbyists they fund.”
For politicians on the receiving end of the cash flow, of course, the dichotomy between their harangues about media malpractice and their silence on political donations isn’t hard to explain. In the 2022 midterms, the cost of a US Senate campaign averaged $13.5 million, a House member’s $1.8 million. After all, whether it’s the Republicans’ “fake news” mantra or the Democrats’ finger-pointing at the fabulists on Fox News, jeremiads to fire up the faithful are one thing, biting the hands that feed their campaign coffers another.
For the media and tech world giants, however, there’s a need to look beyond campaign contributions to measure the length of their arm in the “arms-length” image the companies that own the news try to present. Open Secrets, which tracks lobbying and political donations, is a good place to start. Its data on check writing to win friends and influence issues in Washington shows the media and tech worlds are on a long term roll.
At $100 million in 2023, lobbying by the internet industry has tripled over the last decade. The industry’s platforms—the digital complements to the entertainment conglomerates broadcast, cable, and other outlets—create as well as disseminate the news. The massive lobbying tally reflects a growing effort to influence public policy issues that has vaulted them to the top of the Washington lobbying leader board. Take Meta, Amazon, and Alphabet. They led the internet industry in lobbyist spending last year, laying out $19.7 million, $19.3 million, and $12.3 million respectively.
The broadcast and cable news owners weren’t far behind. According to Open Secrets, the entertainment industry spent $70.4 million on lobbying last year. The category includes Hollywood studios, actors, and their unions but is driven by its heavyweights: broadcast, cable, commercial television and radio stations, and cable and satellite TV operators as well as their industry associations. The 2023 spending total also isn’t an outlier: $70 million lines up with the entertainment industry’s average annual lobbying over a decade.
Do the media and tech giant’s decisions to budget tens of millions of dollars to influence politics and policy matter in what their newsrooms cover? Consider the issue of data privacy, a major challenge for on-line firms. As Lee Fang reported in The Intercept in 2022, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), the trade group representing online media outlets, lobbied against a petition before the Federal Trade Commission to restrict mass data collection. IAB represents CNN, the New York Times, MSNBC, Time, U.S. News and World Report, the Washington Post, Vox, Fox News, and dozens of other media companies.
“Major media companies rely on a vast ecosystem of privacy violations, even as the public relies on them to report on it,” Fang wrote. “The growth of digital advertising has forced nearly every major for-profit news website to utilize the most intrusive forms of mass surveillance, including browsing history and location data.” As for the news coverage of the privacy issue, Fang put it this way. “Major news outlets have remained mostly silent on the FTC’s current push (to restrict mass data collection) and a parallel effort to ban surveillance advertising by the House and Senate…”
The pattern Fang, among others, discerned two years ago raises the obvious question about the news reporting, or lack thereof, on the actions and issues top of mind for the big donors who are bankrolling 2024’s campaign. To be sure, the horserace-style coverage—which candidate is out-fundraising which—has journalists’ attention. But donors and donations? Not so much. The estimate, from GroupM, an ad agency, that the 2024 election could cost $16 billion barely made headlines in January. Save for a few ad executives quoted on where the billion-dollar bounty might go, the story has prompted little news reporting, much less broader analysis since then.
Is GroupM’s estimate or the rapidly rising multibillion dollar tab for national elections actually news? The $16 billion forecast for 2024 admittedly isn’t a surprise. Nor is its estimated 30 percent growth over total spending in 2020. Unsurprising or not, that the gobsmacking figures—a $16 billion election equates to Nicaragua’s GDP—are being largely ignored is itself a story, as are the experts’ warnings that you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. GroupM’s analysts project a $20 billion election in 2028.
And that’s the point. Reporting on the issues raised by the massive lobbying efforts as well as election year largesse of the media industry in all its wondrous forms matters.
From online privacy and cyber defenses against malign actors and their information warfare to policing AI and its burgeoning applications, their role is central to both the nation’s security and its democracy’s integrity. So is the industry’s transparency. The stories that the news organizations the media giants own cover—or don’t—are crucial to Americans, not just their corporate bottom line.