The modern media as it exists at present is incapable of delivering meaningful socio-economic issues during a presidential campaign. This inability is not directly the fault of the media. It is a situation that stems more from the structure of modern American politics, i.e., corporate sponsored politics. Corporate funding not only subsidizes modern American politics, in fact allowing it to exist on the scale that it does, but it also owns the media. As a result, in a capitalist socio-economic structure, politicians, news, and even mass consensus are relegated to products. One is either selling something or buying something. If people do not buy, there are no profits. As such, our modern media, from the Internet to TV, package content like a product, in glossy, slick, neat little sound-bites that hardly convey any meaningful position on social and economic issues affecting millions of Americans. According to W. Lance Bennett in News: The Politics of Illusion, the only things we cannot expect in the form and content of our mass media news are substance, objectivity, and truth. This is because there is a three-way struggle for control of information among the government, interest groups, and the public, but the public is losing ground because of a purposeful attempt by interest groups and the government to keep the real facts of their actions away from the public “As long as information control is essential to the accumulation of power, and as long as information control is tacitly justified by fears of an informed public, political actors will never be compelled to release candid news of their political dealings” (Bennett x).
In Sharing the Pie, Brouwer argues that the unbalanced distribution of wealth continues to worsen in America. Because of this, the balance of power and control continues to be in the hands of the wealthy, who, despite the existence of the media, are able to promote exactly the image they wish to pr...