Quote from: exoton on December 20, 2014, 11:03:53 PM

The entire population may not have a strong enough feeling towards a specific candidate or a specific issue in order for them to want to donate to a campaign.

I think this misses a larger point. The entire population does not have the money to donate to campaigns.

One of the things that I find lacking in the "money in politics debate' is the fact that the major PACS have the money and time to research the demographics of their position in order to muscle it through (convincing people is done through misleading ads/rhetoric). Everyone else has money to get through the day and perhaps glance in to the news in order to gain a feel for what is going on currently - certainly, it can not be said that there is a consistent societal effort to accumulate information to gauge societal and political trend (which has changed slightly due to the onset of the internet).

Point is, if people are focusing on how to pay their bills and take care of their families than an attention to politics and the how/whys of decision making in those forums are not going to be on the personal radar. It's the opportunity cost of attention - and that is why portions of the media can rely on straight up lies in their reporting and on a larger extent rely on distractionary techniques to dissuade attention - because people don't generally have the time to do everything that is necessary. It's one of the reasons the economy is so important. If people had the money to divert their attention to things other than their day to day maintenance to ensure continuance of such, there would be more people paying attention and keeping track of events.

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If both sides of an issue are putting out their own one sided story to the issue then everyone has an equal chance of hearing both sides.

That doesn't even make sense. If both sides are putting out their 'one sided story' than how is there an equal chance for everyone to hear both sides? You're not factoring in regional attention, media manipulation and the level of effort it takes to wade through the bias in order to 'equally hear both sides'. If we factor in what I mentioned previously (opportunity cost of attention) than there is very little chance that we can assume that each side is heard equally. For what it is worth, I haven't yet mentioned the psychological difference in hearing "accusations" vs "statistical data"...media manipulation vs considered research. The mainstream media relies more heavily on the former and to a very large degree in recent memory. The likelihood of a casual attention to politics remembering an accusation because of fear is greater than remembering or even mentally attending to status quo (there is actually quite a bit more we can discuss regarding media psychology).

Point is - There is no equal chance of hearing both sides since obfuscation is the name of the game.

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If you were to force people to spend money on campaigns then it would be essentially the public financing campaigns that may or may not have a chance of succeeding

The issue is not about forcing people to spend money on politics...it's about unrestricting the amount of money in politics. Allowing unlimited spending (which we are on the verge of) allows people with more money to dominate the talking points within the media which ensures that a lot of time gets spent debating misrepresentations, fallacies and just plain old irrelevant bullshite. While we do that, Congress passes bills that were written by their corporate lobbyists and we find ourselves debating within a smaller constraint then we were previously. Rinse and repeat.

That's the issue.