A handful of the wealthiest people in America could easily finance a chosen candidate's entire presidential campaign. And they plan to do it.
Media Matters points out that the same news desks that have been breathless in their coverage of donations to the Clinton's charity efforts have done the exact opposite when it comes to Republicans being vetted and feted by the Koch Brothers and
their network of wealthy difference makers.
The curious revelation that reporters from nine news organizations recently attended Charles and David Koch's political summit and voluntarily agreed not to identify key donors in attendance provided a helpful look into the double standard that the media often use when covering conservatives vs. covering the Clintons.
The Kochs, you see, had another one of their Republican presidential summits, meet-and-greets in which Republican contenders looking for deep-pocketed donors hold forth for about 450 of the Koch's most wealthy and keen-to-invest-in-a-candidate "Freedom Partners" friends. Usually the events are closed to the press, a standard shared by most other top-notch brothels, but this time around the Kochs agreed that members of the press could attend the three day event so long as none of the johns were named. You can report on how the candidates try to sell themselves to an audience looking to collectively spend nearly a billion dollars bankrolling their own presidential candidate, but you can't report on just who in America is looking to buy.
Well, that's ... problematic. And agreeing to such a stipulation is the very essence of "access" journalism. You get "access," but you'll only report the parts we want you to.
In general I'm sympathetic to the journalistic plight involved in these endeavors. Do you attend, getting at least an on-the-background glimpse into the mechanics of these things? Do you pass, because setting restrictions on what can or can't be reported is the antithesis of a supposedly "free" press? Do you attend just so you can compile your personal list of notable attendees for follow-up later? These would all be grand questions, except that the press has been notably uninterested in probing the money connections between individual candidates and individual donors, or just why those donors might be so keen on a particular candidate as opposed to the others, and so there's little expectation that those questions will be answered with or without that access. That dampens the sympathy considerably.