You have to read down to the 13th paragraph in Maeve Reston’s story on funding in the California U.S. Senate race — “Boxer, Fiorina nearly even in fundraising” — before you get to this:
Most of the outside spending in the California Senate race has been on Fiorina’s behalf. A group affiliated with Karl Rove spent $1 million on a weeklong ad buy in August. And the U.S. Chamber of Commerce had spent more than $3.2 million on ads through the end of September criticizing Boxer’s record.
It’s unclear whether the $3.2 million in anonymously donated funds the Chamber spent on Fiorina’s campaign includes the $1,173,625 reported by Campaign Money Watch.
The Chamber — which is a somewhat deceptively named Republican lobbying group that has no relation to local chambers of commerce — openly raises funds from foreign corporations as part of its business model. It is also open about the fact that it uses the funding to encourage U.S. companies to lay off American workers and ship these jobs overseas.
The Chamber has spent tens of millions of dollars in attack ads to help Republicans this cycle, but it has refused repeated calls to reveal the sources of the money, asserting instead that the public — and reporters — will just have to trust it when it says it is careful not to co-mingle foreign and domestic contributions when it pays for campaign ads.
It is illegal for foreigners to donate to U.S. political campaigns.
This issue has special relevance in the California U.S. Senate race because when Carly Fiorina, Sen. Barbara Boxer’s Republican opponent, was CEO of Hewlett-Packard, she laid off 30,000 mostly California-based workers and shipped their jobs overseas. Fiorina was later fired by the HP board of directors over her inept handling of HP’s merger with rival Compaq.
In liberal circles, the collective decision by the corporate media to ignore the U.S. Chamber-GOP anonymous donor controversy has become of the signature issues of the campaign. DNC Chair Tim Kaine has likened it to groupthink during the Nixon era when all but a two or three major media outlets chose to ignore suspicions about a campaign donations-related controversy that became the Watergate scandal.
(Conversely, in the Clinton era, big media couldn’t get enough of the Democrats’ “Chinagate” donor scandal, which, unlike Watergate, ultimately turned out not to have involved any senior Clinton White House officials.)
Corporate media has had a history of pulling its punches on big stories because reporters fear they will be accused of liberal bias by conservatives. That is, in part, why the major media outlets covered the Clinton sex scandal in salacious detail in the late 1990s but stood mute against an obvious blizzard of lies coming from the Bush administration during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2002 and 2003.
Another likely reason media outlets like Los Angeles Times have chosen to ignore the anonymous donors’ controversy this year is that they view it as a “process issue” and therefore something that voters don’t care about. Polling suggests otherwise — like the survey results released last week by the nonpartisan pollsters Survey USA — commissioned by the liberal group Moveon.org — that found that 80 percent of Republicans said voters have a right to know the source of funding for campaign ads. Among all voters, 84 percent agreed, as did 81 percent of independents.
Journalism should not be driven by polls, but an 84 percent response is a good indicator that the public is engaged on this topic. The corporate media’s collective decision to ignore this story — and the Los Angeles Times’ decision to omit the fact that $3.2 million in anonymous, possibly foreign funding has benefited the Fiorina campaign — borders on malpractice.
80% of Republicans, (you say) believe that voters have a right to know the source of funding for campaign ads…Among all voters, 84% agree, as did 81 percent of independents…
Well, sure. Carly dearest (Fiorina) shipped off way WAY more than those 30,000 jobs. (Remember that HP is a nationwide company–as well as being a multinational.) That HP then turned around and screwed her out of her job is par for the course for the Corporatocracy now running things; and for which the US Chamber is the organizing entity.
Now Fiorina’s being pulled out of her mothballs by the same folks who kicked her out of a job. At those levels, it doesn’t matter much who did what to whom yesteryear. All that matters is today–and today, Fiorina polls way WAY better than the Whitman woman, and is now even with Barbara Boxer, whose popularity is, was, and always has been better than either of those two losers; on behalf of whom, unthinkable amounts of money are being poured into their campaigns.
Most of us have supported Barbara Boxer even though we don’t live in California (I’m recently from TX–I’ve been there 20 years from New York) But I beg you to remember one thing:
People will or will NOT vote, depending on their laziness and (studied, I think) ignorance of these issues. Look at it this way–The American People sure can’t claim they’re “too busy” to vote anymore, OR to read up on things to do with elections; they’re too busy lining up for the Food Stamps, the Welfare Office, the Unemployment Office, and everything else that they need, since Bush during the last days of his ill-gotten presidency, dumped millions of jobs overseas and left Obama with this mess.
The media wasn’t ‘corporatized’ the way that it is now, before the mid-90s. Remember Ted Turner’s (King of Cable) concept of “Infotainment”? That information should be blended with entertainment? Well, dear Rupert Murdoch who through his NewsCorp now owns all the papers and all the channels in the USA, from whatever castle he sits in in his native Australia, he is the one who decides WHAT news is “fit to print” and what isn’t.
One man, a foreigner, controls our once-vaunted Free Press. He’s a Republican–giving millions hand over fist to political races all across the country. (What else George W. Bush left this country (especially with John Roberts as the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court) was the case of Citizens United, which opened the door wide to foreign money running American electoral practices and thereby buying our elections.
And you wonder that even the Republicans, are running scared of what their corporate “allies” have turned America into? Yeah, enough Republicans still consider themselves Americans, to fear for their country these days. And that did come as a shock to me.