Be a revolutionary, turn off the TV
By
Dave Winer on Monday, June 18, 2012 at 9:01 AM.
 Recitals.  1. We're about to go into a presidential campaign season like none before, thanks to the Supreme Court ruling that said there were no limits on the money super-rich people can give to fund campaigns of political candidates.
2. Where will that money go? Into TV advertising. Huge amounts of it.
3. Not just for the presidential race, for congressional and local elections too.
 Okay this is digusting. To watch a small number of insulated and opinionated people with really perverse sense of their own importance (they are human, not gods, and they get sick and die like the rest of us), basically undermine the last vestiges of popular power in the US. But wait, the laws are still on the books. We don't have to vote for the candidates they want us to. If we don't, then they have to find another more visible, illegal way to hijack the political process.
So what if we don't watch the ads? What then?
Well, change, for one thing. The price of the ads will drop. The TV networks, who have been pumping up the candidates who raise the most money, greedily anticipating their coffers filling with the cash, would have to re-think their business models. Goodbye Blitzer and Madow. Reverend Al and Billow.
Now, without ads to tell you who to vote for, you'd have to find the information some other way. That, in itself could be pretty revolutionary.
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