Even cheaper for the networks is to have politicians on as guests -- they show up for free! -- which may be why they're almost never held to account in any serious way. After all, if you piss off a politician on your network and they refuse to ever come back on the air, you've lost another bit of "free" talent. And if you piss off an entire political party, and your programming model doesn't work without "balance," you're really screwed.
There's a reason people all over America are screaming at their TVs every Sunday morning: the majority of guests are conservatives or Republicans, and much of what they offer as "fact" or "opinion" is merely lies and propaganda. Which leads us to number three.
3. Media Corporations Are Corporations, Too
It's easy to postulate that the absolute lack of coverage of the death, at GOP hands, of net neutrality is because two of the big three cable TV networks are (or soon will be) owned by internet service providers (NBC/MSNBC is owned by Comcast, AT&T is trying to buy CNN), and other big corporations see all sorts of financial advantage if they can use their financial and programming muscle to dominate a newly sliced-and-diced corporatized internet.
Consider: When was the last time you heard an intelligent discussion on TV about taxing the rich? Or holding corporations accountable when they break the law? Or how destructive oligopolies and monopolies are to workers? Or how big pharma scams us about their R&D expenses and price fixing, buying up generic companies, etc.? The list could go on for pages.
Back in the day, the big joke in corporate America was, "You know it's going to be a bad day when you get to work in the morning and there's a '60 Minutes' news truck outside the building." The last time this was seriously considered was in the late 1980s, as in this article about "60 Minutes" doing an expose' of the meat industry. Now, not so much.
The simple fact is that TV "news" organizations are now for-profit operations, and, lacking regulation like the Fairness Doctrine, thus have the same natural and inherent biases toward protecting corporate power and privilege, and the wealth and privilege of their management and largest shareholders.
They also derive the bulk of their money from two sources -- billionaire-funded political campaigns (have you noticed how there's no in-depth coverage of the political spending of the Kochs, Adelsons, and Mercers of the world?), and giant transnational corporate advertisers.
All those campaign ads represent hundreds of millions of dollars going right into the pockets of the networks and their affiliates, along with other corporate advertising revenue. Lacking a regulation like the Fairness Doctrine to require actual "programming in the true public interest news," who'd bite those hands that feed them?
4. Corporations Like Republicans
The final possibility that occurs to me (and others in media with whom I've discussed this over the years) is that the large TV and radio news operations simply like what the GOP stands for. They also know that if GOP policies were widely understood, the Republican Party would fade into the kind of powerless obscurity it enjoyed for most of the FDR-to-Reagan era, when working people's salaries were growing faster than management and the middle class was solid and stable.
TV networks don't like unions or uppity workers or regulation any more than any other billion-dollar corporation. They'd prefer the salaries of their senior corporate management weren't debated (or even known). They prefer to live in today's semi-monopolistic system where they're only minimally held accountable, and want to keep it that way.
This is the core of GOP ideology that media shares: Cut taxes on rich people, kill off the unions, cut welfare so more of that money can go to rich people's tax cuts, deregulate big corporations so they can act without regard to the public good, and subsidize big corporations with government funds whenever and wherever possible.
But if any of these issues were ever explicitly discussed on TV, all hell would break loose. Can you imagine if Bill Kristol or Rick Santorum or any of the other dozens of right-wing trolls who inhabit cable TV were ever asked about their actual positions on policy?
Should we sell off (privatize) Social Security to the big New York banks as the GOP has wanted to do since the 1930s? Should we end Medicare and Medicaid and turn everybody over to the tender mercies of the insurance industry? Should we stop subsidizing the fossil fuel industry? What should we do about the audit that found $21 trillion (yes, with a T) missing from the Pentagon? How do we break the stranglehold monopolistic drug corporations have on the pricing of our pharmaceuticals?
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
1
