From WNYC in New York, this is on the media.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield.

And the midterm elections right around the corner, as you well know, an up close look.

This election season is on pace to break the record for most expensive midterms ever at nearly $4 billion.

In the wake of the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United ruling, a new report paints a

decidedly bleak picture of politics.

The court determines that corporations and unions have the right to express their First

Amendment rights with politically directed cash.

The only limit placed on these groups is that they do not collude with their

favored candidates' campaigns.

But the Brennan Center for Justice found that even that sole puny caveat has been

pervasively and systematically ignored by candidates and big spenders at all levels of elected government.

Consider former Utah Attorney General John Swallow, who used secretive outside interest groups

to mask generous campaign donations from payday loan companies,

which he subsequently favored with very light regulation.

Here's Chie Sun Lee, co-author of the Brennan Center report.

The New York Times coverage called it the nightmare scenario of campaign finance corruption.

In Utah, the campaign finance laws are so lax that even with a multi-million dollar investigation, it's not clear that the law was

violated. And so there's been some movement in Utah to reform their campaign finance laws.

Now, if those allegations are true, it's something close to a direct form of bribery, but there are subtler ways

for a campaign to influence supposedly independent donor and vice versa. For example, you have

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