Lawrence Lessig recently announced that he is changing the focus of his work from the copyright and intellectual-property realm, in which he has made such a mark over the past decade, to a new area: corruption. Having directly encountered the dysfunctionality of our system of government in his battles with the copyright lobby, the law professor and activist has decided to tackle the problem at the root:
I don’t mean corruption in the simple sense of bribery. I mean “corruption” in the sense that the system is so queered by the influence of money that it can’t even get an issue as simple and clear as term extension right. Politicians are starved for the resources concentrated interests can provide. In the US, listening to money is the only way to secure reelection. And so an economy of influence bends public policy away from sense, always to dollars.
I will certainly look forward to seeing how Lessig — who has both a sharp legal mind and a stirring, impassioned presentation style — takes on “corruption”: what does he take aim at? What can he accomplish?
But corruption per se has been around forever (go read Suetonius!). It’s hard to see what headway any individual effort can make against the tide of human greed.
On the other hand, there is, it seems to me, one very specific aspect of the corruption of our politics that is both massive in its impact and tractable to reform efforts.
The money that drives American politics today isn’t, for the most part, money that ends up in pockets as crude bribes. The sums involved even in less obvious payoffs in the form of revolving-door regulators and the like are similarly not that huge. The vast bulk of the money that U.S. politicians ceaselessly seek is raised for one single purpose: to purchase TV ads.
There is an iron triangle of cash at the heart of our political system. Candidates scramble for dollars from contributors so they can hand them to TV stations. Sickeningly, our political candidates have become a valuable source of revenue for the broadcast and cable networks whose job is to cover their candidacies. The pols beg us for our money, and it goes straight to media corporations’ bottom lines.
Anything we do to break this chain will provide immediate relief to our political system. We could try to regulate the total volume of political TV advertising (difficult for First Amendment reasons). Or we could simply reduce the centrality of television itself so the ads cease to be a useful way for politicians to broadcast messages.
One way or another, the answer to cleaning up politics lies in reducing the cost of a successful candidacy by cutting TV as far out of the equation as possible. Accomplish that, and a lot of other things will take care of themselves.
[tags]lawrence lessig, political corruption, television, campaign ads[/tags]
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