The front page of Thursday’s USA Today newspaper reported on a Susan Page interview with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. The headline was “McConnell is unyielding on Iran, defiant on Kochs.”
The media define “defiant” as “willing to suggest the media are free-speech hypocrites.” Page suggested the amount of Koch spending was inappropriate, just too large. She told McConnell “jaws dropped this week” when the Koch brothers announced they would spend $889 million in the 2016 cycle.
"The Koch brothers as citizens have every right, just like Tom Steyer does on the left, to spend every penny they've got on political expression, if they chose to," McConnell said, a reference to the liberal California billionaire. "I don't think that's anything that threatens American democracy."
When Page asked “Does the sheer amount of money involved here concern you at all?,” he replied: "How much speech is too much? That's always an interesting question to ask. How many people have to sit down and shut up in order to make the process work? My view is that in a free country with free speech, everybody ought to be as free to express themselves as Gannett."
USA Today then noted “The Gannett Co. owns USA TODAY, The Louisville Courier-Journal and other news outlets across the country."
That's poor-mouthing it. Here's what Gannett boasts on its website:
Through its powerful network of broadcast, digital, mobile and print products, the company informs and engages more than 110 million people every month.
Gannett’s iconic national brands, such as USA TODAY and CareerBuilder, as well as its unique local brands serving nearly 120 communities, set the company apart and provide a strong brand advantage. Gannett’s properties cover a wide range of geographies, demographics and content areas, which combine to form a uniquely powerful and comprehensive portfolio of offerings for consumers and commercial clients alike.
Gannett owns or services through shared service agreements or other similar agreements 46 television stations. Excluding owner-operators, Gannett is the No. 1 NBC affiliate group; No. 1 CBS affiliate group; and the No. 4 ABC affiliate group. These stations cover 30% of the U.S. population in markets with nearly 35 million households.
Following the acquisition of Belo Corp. in December 2013, Gannett became the largest independent TV station group of major network affiliates in the top 25 U.S. markets, with a strong, diversified portfolio. Each TV station also has a robust digital presence, including mobile, to reach consumers wherever they are.
Overall, Gannett reaches more than 65 million unique visitors monthly or about 29 percent of the U.S.
...The company operates 82 U.S. daily publications, including USA TODAY, and 443 non-daily local publications in 30 states and Guam. USA TODAY ranks No. 1 in the industry in total daily circulation, according to the Alliance for Audited Media.
Affiliated digital products of the company’s U.S. publications, including USA TODAY, reach more than 39 million unique visitors monthly. The print products reach more than 10 million readers every weekday and more than 12 million readers every Sunday.
The newspaper didn’t print the rest of McConnell's answer:
There’s no restraints on what Gannett can do. They’re a huge corporation with a big megaphone, reaching a whole lot of people in America. I’m okay with that. Even though I don’t always agree with what the editorial policy is. So I find it no more offensive that Gannett has all that speech than that organizations of individuals do. Everybody can have their fair say in America.
No one compiles estimates of how much media outlets are spending on political “news” – or liberal “speech” – that influences elections. Media influence on elections isn’t conflated by journalists with corruption, even when the news outlets are owned by large corporations with their own lobbying departments. Comcast – the owners of NBC and MSNBC – has the largest lobbying operations (next to Google) in Washington. But they don’t tell you that on their networks.
Philip Bump of The Washington Post tried to horrify the public by asserting that “If the Kochs decided to blow all of that money on a Super Bowl ad on Sunday instead of the 2016 campaign, they could run a spot that ran for 99 minutes (at the reported rate of $4.5 million for 30 seconds).”
But the network news divisions run many hours of news programming every day, a much larger expenditure – even though you can argue that the share of political news is ever-shrinking. How much in campaign-ad airtime equivalence was “spent” televising President Obama’s State of the Union address on every news network in America? No one asks. No one counts. And it's a double standard. The media's communications are often just as loaded as campaign commercials. Anyone who watched the media boost Obama in 2008 knows that.
