Big Money Out, Public Media In

Democracy gets strange when the loudest voice in the room turns out to be the one with the biggest ad budget. We are told the argument is free and open, right up until the argument starts wearing a sponsor badge and smelling faintly of billionaire fertilizer. That is not a public square. That is a paid parade with a very serious press release.

I’ve seen cleaner paperwork in a collapsing binder. Every outrage has a receipt, every panic cycle has a routing number, and the donor line keeps going missing like a witness who suddenly remembered a prior engagement. If a free people are supposed to hear the argument, not just the advertising budget, then somebody in this town is confusing democracy with a checkout lane. The filing blinked first. The public shouldn’t have to.