Corporate personhood

Someone on Facebook objected Tuesday to my assertion there (in connection with Friday's post, "Calling all voters") that "donating money for election campaigns is unnecessary; most American voters can read and have the ability to obtain reliable information about the candidates and the issues. They don't need to watch or read political advertisements."
    I was later grateful that, in objecting, Mr. Tom Lowe directed my attention to the Frank Rich article in the June 16 issue of New York Magazine ("Nuke 'Em: Why negative advertisements are powerful, essential, and sometimes (see “Daisy”) even artistic"), for I based yesterday's post about political attack ads on it.
    But the first part of Tom's comment was:

Problem with that stance is—according to the recent studies I've seen—most people get their information from TV these days. So acting on this reasonable principle means ceding the advantage to Fox News and the Koch brothers.

    To which I at the time flippantly replied:

Technically, [the post's] second suggestion ("Ignore the campaigns, don't watch advertising") covers this, seeing as how Fox News is essentially political advertising.

    Then yesterday I saw Jeremy W. Peters's article, "Enemies and Allies for ‘Friends’, in The New York Times, critical for the usual reasons of Fox News and, in particular, of its show "Fox & Friends":

"You can huff and puff about how outrageous [Fox News] is," Mr. Weiner [the former New York congressman who was one of the few members of his party regularly to accept Fox News invitations] said. "But they have millions and millions of people watching them. And you have to proceed under the assumption that at least some of those people are persuadable."
    Despite all the outrageousness there is a keen self-awareness inside the network about "Fox & Friends." "We reflect who the audience is," said Mr. Shine, offering a recent example. "We didn’t spend a lot of time discussing who won the Tony Awards."
    He added, "Our audience knows us, and we know them."

Incestuous clan that, Fox News and its audience.

I took advantage of Mr. Peters's publishing immediately on the heels of my remark about Fox News's being "political advertising" to bolster my flippant reply by posting a link to his article on Facebook, commenting that,

As I said to Tom Lowe recently in a comment on Facebook, Fox News is essentially political advertising, watched by folks who don't (and apparently can't) think for themselves and want (and possibly need) to be told what to believe (so long as it suits their existing prejudices).

    Flippant indeed. Why single out Fox News?
    Joe Story, a political observer in Kansas City, Missouri, pointed out that

The same could be said about MSNBC. Fox News is not the only channel in the political advertising, brain washing business. I don't watch either show.

    And the reliably well-informed Mr. Lowe, who is a close student of history and an astute social commentator out in Berkeley, California (the city of my birth), made a more general point, one particularly pointed in the context of attack ads designed to nuke Mitt Romney:

Just as ABC was known in the Reagan era as the "Administration Broadcasting Company," CBS provided press credentials to CIA operatives in the 1950s and 60s, and NBC ran pro nuclear energy stories on their news shows when owned by General Electric. No clean hands to be found anywhere when corporate interests are involved. [emphasis mine]

Whose context?
    Right.
    His who said: "Corporations are people."