According to the Federal Reserve, the share of wealth owned by the top 1% in the US recently hit a record, the highest since tracking began. The top 1% today holds $55 trillion in wealth, roughly the same amount held by the entire bottom 90% of all Americans. Today’s uber rich enjoy staggering wealth, and they wield control of traditional and online media outlets to keep it that way.
Nationwide, television, print, and major digital platforms are now controlled by a handful of largely right wing, ultra-rich individuals and corporations using those media to forge national narratives that serve their own interests: tax gifts, subsidies, write-offs, loopholes, deregulation, and weakened labor, environmental and banking laws that advance their own wealth at the expense of everyone else.
Economists say we are in our second Gilded Age, where industry scions and robber barons run roughshod over labor, the environment, and the rule of law. The long-simmering, slow-motion transfer of political power from the working electorate to wealthy elites began decades ago, through legal and regulatory changes rather than any single dramatic event.
The key to transferring political power back to the middle class is understanding what took it from them.
How Republicans pulled off the oligarchs’ coup
Democracy has always depended on access to a truthful public square — from which to shape informed political judgments — where political power flowed from informed votes rather than wealth. This foundation crumbled under two major shifts: The 1987 repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, and the 2010 Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United. These two developments cleared the way for the top 1% to exert outsized control over both public opinion and state and federal elections, turning the US into the billboard of inequality we are today, with broken healthcare, barely-there public education, and eroded social safety nets limping alongside staggering wealth and the most corrupt regime the nation has ever known.
The Fairness doctrine, in effect from 1949 through 1987, required broadcasters to tell the truth in the news, and, when offering opinions, to present the opposing viewpoint. After Reagan Republicans repealed the Fairness Doctrine, broadcasters were suddenly free to adopt a single ideological orientation and promote it for profit, harm to public discourse be damned. Today we see the effect of building an audience around opinion, grievance and outrage instead of verified facts as the percentage of Americans who still support Trump despite his incompetence correlates exactly with the percentage who watch Fox News.
Then, beginning in 2010, the horrific Citizens United ruling allowed Super PACs to raise and spend unlimited sums on elections while dark money nonprofits, which are not required to disclose their donors, expanded. In result, private wealth began buying elections, converting economic power of the elites into political power.
Elon Musk alone spent $250 million on the 2024 election. Last week, right after SpaceX landed a $1.6 billion federal contract, Musk committed to spending another $120 million to increase Republican voter turnout in the midterms.
End stage: Trump’s illicit gains from the White House
The breakdown in our democratic system rests on the interaction between Citizens United and un-regulated news, not just their individual effects. A media environment unmoored from accuracy requirements provided the infrastructure — cable networks, talk radio, and later digital platforms — through which right wing political messaging could be aired with no competing viewpoints or facts. Campaign finance deregulation amplified that messaging at scale, letting the nation’s top 1% spread the same narratives pushed on conservative “news” outlets. Together, they led to unprecedented cuts in food assistance, health care, education programs, and student loan services while delivering massive tax breaks to the ultra-rich.
In short, the uber rich have bought up media outlets to manipulate low education voters with addictive culture wars — and the denial of science — so that they can decimate government services and rob them blind.
Sabrina Haake is a 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her columns are published in Alternet, Chicago Tribune, MSN, Out South Florida, Raw Story, Salon, Smart News and Windy City Times. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.
