Watching inequality

In the past week, America’s youth demographic was dealt the two biggest blows of the decade (granted, we’re only a month in): the ousting of Conan O’Brien from “The Tonight Show” and the Supreme Court ruling of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. While bidding adieu to our beloved CoCo has been bittersweet, the ruling of the Supreme Court case has drawn ire—among young and old alike—that is widespread and deservedly intense.

The court’s decision reverses an almost century-long trend to curb the influence of corporations and unions. In general, federal law prohibits corporations and unions from donating money to advocate for the election or defeat of a particular candidate. On Jan. 21, by a vote of 5-4, the court overruled two precedents, threw out parts of a 63-year-old federal law, and invalidated part of the landmark McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill.

By now, it has been widely reported that the result of the ruling is that corporations and unions will have the ability to produce and run their own campaign ads. They will be able to do so within the final days of a campaign. Without a doubt, corporations selling votes on behalf of a candidate will be granted far more influence than individuals, including college students who can only afford to make small donations.

Little discussed, however, is the role of new media in last week’s ruling. According to federal law, media corporations such as the New York Times are allowed to endorse candidates by name. But deciding what constituted a media company was much easier in an era in which there were only three major television networks and a few large publishers.

Nowadays, ordinary Americans use a variety of media—blogs and Youtube videos, especially. For Columbia’s twenty-somethings, it’s almost passé to even make this point at all. Yet, it’s still one that’s worth making in light of the fact that, according to University of California, Los Angeles law professor Eugene Volokh, this is the first time a Supreme Court opinion has included the word “blog.”

Writing the majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy warned that soon the government would begin censoring political blogging that received any funds from corporations. However, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in the dissenting opinion that the law “does not apply to printed material” and that the government need not worry about a ban on “books, pamphlets, and blogs.” He also wrote that the Federal Election Commission would never try to pursue such a ban. In short, there is little danger that substantive censorship will be imposed on real individuals.

It’s been a year since the inauguration of President Barack Obama. Regardless of whether he’s been more of a president of continuity than of change, he is still indisputably the presidential candidate who mobilized young people by appealing to our sensibilities and utilizing campaign tools like social networking sites to reach out to our often ignored demographic. The Internet has proven to be a powerful strategic tool and a forum for open discussion. But it remains to be seen if cyber speech will increasingly engage independents or continue to occur in a kind of high-speed echo chamber within political parties and age brackets.

People are using the Internet more and more, but the media consumption patterns of the older and younger generation are clearly different. The mention of blogs in a Supreme Court ruling illustrates this, but so, too, does the other event that shook the new decade to its core—the O’Brien-Leno dispute. Bill Carter of the New York Times writes that, even though young people were immensely supportive of O’Brien, they did not actually watch his show. Instead, as analysts demonstrate, those in the 18-25 age bracket were sharing the funniest clips with one another over Facebook or watching episodes on Hulu.

The new ruling may have similarly devastating effects on young people in the world of politics. In American society, there is an oft-unspoken geriatric bias wherein it is the older generation that wields economic and, by extension, political power. Young people, who have yet to earn enough money to dramatically leverage politicians, are left by and large voiceless in the political process. That was why President Obama’s campaign approach inspired so many young people and prompted the star-struck youth to engage in grassroots campaigning using the tools provided by the Internet. Most importantly, we were moved to contribute our small donations, which ultimately had a collective impact on the outcome of the 2008 presidential elections. With this new ruling, the baby boomer generation will potentially have an unbridled monopoly on advertising through both old and new media—further drowning out the voices of America’s youth.

While 90-year-old Justice Stevens was most likely not a member of “Team CoCo” and doesn’t have his own Facebook page, his 90-page opinion demonstrates that what young and old can agree on is that economic inequality should not translate into political inequality.

The author is a Columbia College junior majoring in history. She is the editor in chief of the Columbia Political Review.