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John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney talk about their new book, Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex is Destroying America.Click here for GoDaddy deal that benefits the PBC Podcast!
Nichols is DC Correspondent for The Nation, McChesney is professor of Communications at University of Illinois; they are co-founders of Free Press, the media reform group.
Their new book explores the exponential growth in political spending in 2012, partly fueled by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. In this wide ranging conversation, we talk about the way our elected leaders are compromised by big money interests, and the staggering $10 billion spent nationally last year. We discuss how TV stations generate big revenue from political ads, and then fail to provide any coverage of the campaigns on their news programs.
They comment on the decline of journalism, Glenn Greenwald’s new media venture funded by billionaire Pierre Omidyar–and Nichols cautions that we can’t wait for billionaires to fix our media. And they provide important history that led to Citizens United, the story of Justice Lewis Powell, the tobacco lawyer who wrote a blueprint for corporate activism in US politics.