Part of the Series
Moyers and Company
Zephyr Teachout ran against New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary earlier this year, on a populist platform. While she lost, she received more than a third of the vote and carried almost half of the state’s 62 counties.
While Teachout is well known for her efforts to limit the influence of money on politics, she still needed to raise money to fund her campaign. In this clip, she tells Bill that she felt like a “vacuum cleaner salesman” as she spent hours smiling and dialing in an effort to raise funds.
“If you have to spend half your day, 70 percent of your day, talking to donors and then turn around and give a speech engaging people on the issues that matter to them — their dental care, credit cards, the real difficulty finding a job — it feels false,” says Teachout, a constitutional and property law professor at Fordham Law School. “It’s hard to have those two conversations at the same time and gradually I think people have gotten more and more disillusioned because they feel like they aren’t being served.”
Teachout and Lawrence Lessig, campaign finance reform advocates, appear on this week’s show: The Bare Knuckle Fight Against Money in Politics.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
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