How do we know the issues of the day? How do we know what options are out there for us?

For the most part, we turn to our favorite newspaper or TV news show to find out. Some of us cruise the Net and read books, but Americans largely rely on the mainstream media for information. That's what it's there for. Presumably.

Here's my question: Does the mainstream press have a duty to the political process, or should the media be just a mouthpiece for big money?

Here's a vivid case in point.

Senator Hillary Clinton is being challenged in the Democratic primary by Jonathan Tasini. He wants a debate.

He's on the ballot. Fifteen thousand signatures are required. He got 40,000. That's tough to do without money. It means he had to convince people to volunteer and the volunteers had to convince 40,000 people to sign something that didn't get them a free coupon for a Happy Meal.

Tasini polls at 13 percent.

Perhaps more important is that he has taken stands that are distinctly different from Clinton's. He is a choice, not an echo (as they used to say about Barry Goldwater). The first difference is that his stands are clear and concise. Clinton's stands are generally as fuzzy as possible, reserving wiggle room for the 2008 presidential race.

Tasini is against the war in Iraq. Hillary voted for it and continues to support it. Sniping at Rumsfeld doesn't change that.

Tasini is in favor of gay marriage.

Clinton voted for the Defense of Marriage Act. That's one of those wonderful Republican names. It does nothing to defend marriage. It actually assaults marriages that are between gay people. If one state makes same-sex marriage legal and a couple gets married there, the bill allows other states not to recognize that marriage and it mandates that the federal government not accept it.

She voted for the Patriot Act. She's in favor of a law to trump the First Amendment and make flag burning illegal. She's to the right of George Bush on immigration policy.

Tasini is for a single-payer national health system, he's against the sort of free trade that NAFTA brought us, sending American jobs overseas and weakening unions.

New Yorkers, and especially New York Democrats, are probably much closer to Tasini than to Clinton on the issues.

So Tasini has legitimacy and standing and the differences between the two candidates are certainly worth hearing.

Here's where corporate greed clashes with media responsibility and big money blurs a line that the general public rarely, if ever, gets to see.

Tasini wanted to debate Senator Clinton, but cable news channel NY1, the primary host of political debates in New York, refused to air a Clinton-Tasini debate. Why? Because Tasini hasn't raised enough money—not the arbitrary amount of $500,000 that was set by NY1.

Hillary Clinton has. She's raised $49 million, including $101,010 from Time Warner, who owns NY1.

Should we infer that there is a "vast right-wing conspiracy" by Hillary and her million-dollar friends?

In a sense, yes.

In order for a candidate to be taken seriously, not just by Time Warner but by the media in general, he or she has to have raised a lot of money.

To raise big money, you have to jump when corporations say "Let's play leapfrog," and hop when millionaires say, "I like toads."

You can find the list of her contributors at www.opensecrets.org. That's how we know that Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Lehman Brothers, General Electric, Cablevision, insurance companies, and the healthcare industry all love the way Clinton skips and jumps.

Do we think that corporations give to politicians as an act of the heart, like throwing a buck to the beggar on the street? Or because they believe that a given candidate will give us a better-governed country?

Or do they invest in the kind of person who shares their world view, who will answer the phone, personally, when they, their lawyers, and their lobbyists call?

Try this out. Call up Senator Clinton's office and see if you, a humble citizen of New York, can get to speak to her. Alright, we don't really expect that. Try calling and getting an assistant, an office peon, to tell you her position—on anything.

Let us return to the story of the debates.

Here's the good news.

People noticed. There was outrage. Enough so that NY1 responded.

Here's the real news: NY1 responded by canceling all the Senate debates.

NY1 is a symbol of the essential problem.

In 2004, it cost an average of $1 million to run for a seat in the House.

It cost an average of $7 million to run for the Senate.

If you're in the press room or the news room of a TV station, you really only report on candidates with a lot of money. Nobody says that, because everyone has internalized it. But if, say, all the reporters went on strike and were replaced with scabs straight out of journalism school, and an editor had to explain it, he or she would say something like, "Hillary's got the bucks, she's gonna win, so we cover what she has to say. If she has a position, you can get a line or two about it from whoever-the-fug-it-is running against her, whatshisname."

The editor would not say, "Hillary's got $49 million dollars and more coming, she can buy all the ads she wants. We have to redress the balance. That's the public interest. Get on Tasini. Cover every damn thing he does. If he's got a position, go and get a line from Hillary to show her stand too, but getting Tasini's message out there comes first, to counter the money."

That is an unimaginable scenario.

The peculiarity here is that Clinton doesn't need coverage. Her $49 million will buy as much airtime as she could possibly want. If she had a stand on any issue, she could make it known. If she simply wants image, image, image—as apparently she does—she can do that too.

But Clinton gets coverage. Because money makes her the likely winner.

The less her opponent has frog-hopped around the corporate ponds, the less money he has; the less money he has, the less likely he is to win and the less coverage he gets. In this case, as in most cases, it also means that the issues won't get debated. Alternatives won't be discussed. Only one bundle of messages gets out. The one from the candidate of the banks, the brokers, big corporate law firms, insurance, information, and telecom industries.

In this way, without media people ever really having to admit it to themselves, they have become the house organ, a simple public relations transmission device for our large corporate interests.

So, yes, Hillary, there is a vast corporate conspiracy. I'm sure you're pleased to be part of it, rather than the subject of it.

And as for you, dear reader, you've taken at least one step out of that system—you read Chronogram.