When Money Became Speech

Landslide

NPR

History

4.8 • 762 Ratings

🗓️ 2 May 2024

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

After Watergate, both parties cracked down on political spending with a new, strict campaign finance law. But instead of money in politics shrinking, it exploded. In this bonus episode, historian Marc C. Johnson joins Landslide host Ben Bradford to talk about what happened, the legal saga that threw open the doors to spending by outside groups, and how it radically changed not just presidential campaigns, but every race for federal office.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	What's in store for the music, TV, and film industries for 2025?
0:04.9	We don't know, but we're making some fun, bold predictions for the new year.
0:09.5	Listen now to the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast from NPR.
0:14.1	This is another bonus episode of Landslide.
0:17.0	It's a production of nuanced tales in partnership with WFAE and distributed by the NPR network.
0:26.6	At one point, back in the mid-1800s, whale oil was the most prized fuel in America for lighting homes.
0:34.7	It led to a whole industry of commercial whaling, the novel Moby Dick, among other things.
0:40.2	And I mentioned this,
0:41.3	only because of how antiquated whale oil is
0:43.9	compared to our modern energy sources.
0:46.4	Political campaigns,
0:47.7	until the mid-1970s,
0:49.7	ran on the equivalent of whale oil.
0:52.2	The campaign finance before that era
0:54.3	looks just as antiquated.
0:56.9	And then,
0:57.9	a sudden explosion of dollars,
1:01.3	a radical change driven by law,
1:03.4	technology, opportunism,
1:05.3	and a little bit of happenstance.
1:07.5	And it reshaped not just how campaigns raise money,
1:13.0	but the essential fabric of our politics.
	...

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