Suppose you own a large successful business which makes money by telling customers things they want to hear - reassuring stories, comforting platitudes and advice and guidance about how to live their lives. Suppose also that, for tax reasons, you are not allowed to use your influence over your customers to push them towards voting for one particular candidate over another, and you're also not allowed to donate any of the company's profits to political parties or candidates.
However, you'd still prefer to have one candidate elected over another because your preferred candidate might lower your taxes or give you more freedom to run your business the way you want to run it, or maybe just because he's a good customer. How could you covertly support that candidate?
One thing you could do is a pick a couple of social issues which aren't fundamentally a big deal to you one way or another but which differentiate your preferred candidate from their opposition and which the opposition is unlikely to change their minds on (perhaps because they are objectively correct in their position). Then you can use your platform to tell your audience that your preferred position on said social issues is vitally important, and deciding the wrong way on them will lead the country to ruin. You don't even need to mention the names of the political candidates or the upcoming election to your audience at all - they can figure out themselves what they need to do.
For this reason I think we need to avoid making "tax deductions for political neutrality" deals - it's too easy for the organizations in question to be covertly politically non-neutral and the tricks they use cause pressure to move candidates away from objectively correct positions in this kind of issue.
Yeah, but a business with sufficient influence to sway large numbers of people on social issues will have a serious effect on society itself, irrespective of politics.
I guess you're talking about news organizations, CNN etc.? I guess many swing right simply because populism is almost always right-wing.
Yes, such a business will generally have a big effect on society about anything that it decides to care about. News organizations were not what I had in mind here - I think they can exert political influence more directly without having to go the back route via social issues. Even if you are trying to appear impartial it's very easy to ask harder questions of one candidate than another, emphasize some stories while neglecting others, etc.
What kind of organizations are you taking about then?
Religions. (And here I was thinking I was being too overt!)
A-ha that explains the tax-breaks - sorry for being dumb. To be fair I was thrown by the first sentence. You have a pretty jaundiced view of religion - are they really that militant in the US? I suppose they are.
Yes, politics and religion in the US are very intertwined. It's essentially impossible for an atheist to run for most political offices, and enormous numbers of people choose who to vote for based on issues like limiting marriage to heterosexuals, banning abortion, teaching creationism instead of evolution in schools, limiting sex education to "abstinence-only" programs and so on, simply because the preachers (who often live in expensive houses and drive very fancy cars) espouse at great length about these issues every Sunday. Sometimes it's even more overt, such as the explicit support by several religious organizations of Proposition 8 in California in 2008.