The Center for Public Integrity maintains an online website which cross-references media ownership records with campaign finance records, called MediaTracker. By typing in your zip code or city and state in the search form on the front page, you can discover which companies own the media in area - including TV, radio, cable, broadband and newspapers. What's more, those companies are cross-referenced with campaign finance records, to give us some idea of the ideological bias of the media owners. For example, here's the political influence of Clear Channel - unsurprisingly, employees and PACs of the company contribute much more to Republicans than to Democrats (nearly 70% to Republicans, and 30% to Democrats). - Shai Sachs, MyDDThe tool allows the user to delve deeply into the ownership and political activities of media, including analyzing, in depth, which companies gave money to which politicians.
For example, in radio, the top four ownership groups are Clear Channel, Walt Disney Co., Bonneville Radio (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) and CBS. Between these four, over $9.8 million has been given to politicians, PACs and parties. Approximately $5.4 million was given to Democrats, mostly Walt Disney and CBS, and $4.4 million given to Republicans, mostly Walt Disney and Clear Channel. Walt Disney gave a lot of money to both sides over the past ten years.
Some notable recipients of the radio industry's good fortune include Eric Cantor, Bob Goodlatte and Rich Boucher. Eric Cantor received the largest contributions by far, no doubt because of his role in the Republican House Ledership. Many of them also gave to George Allen (which turned out to be a poor investment).
For television, there was much less conglomeration of ownership, although News Corp, Sinclair Broadcasting Group and Ion Media Networks own two stations each. This group of ownership gave $2.1 million to the Democrats and $3.7 million to the Republicans. Frank Wolf himself has received $3000 from News Corp in the past five years. Though television is the dominant medium of our age (at least for now), the radio industry eclipsed the television industry in terms of political giving. Across both industries, political giving to the Republicans ($8.1 million) outstripped political giving to the Democrats ($7.5 million).
It is important not only to get the news, but to understand who we are getting the news from.
(Crossposted from Leesburg Tomorrow.)