The big news of the day was the long-awaited release of the Supreme Court’s campaign finance decision. After years of grappling with precedent and signalling that he was sick of struggling with it, Justice Kennedy finally took the final step and wrote the decision many of us expected he would. Corporations are now free to spend whatever they want in furtherance of their political aims.

Standing alone, that decision is striking, and to many progressives and Democrats, it is also dangerous. When I mentioned that the holding in the case has led many to believe that media form is more important than ever before, Senator Bob Casey agreed.

The premise is that we are experiencing an unprecedented degree of media consolidation. Across the media spectrum, from radio, to television, to publishing to cinema, fewer people than ever before control larger microphones than ever before. And it is these media corporations that stand to benefit from the windfall of new corporate expenditures about to be deployed in every election cycle. We’ve already seen corporate news providers self-censor out of respect for their advertisers; opening the spigots to allow corporate spending on political advocacy raises some profound questions. For example, (stretch your imagination for this), suppose Monsanto or Goldman Sachs or Boeing have a friend they’d like to keep in Congress. Suppose they decide to spend a few hundred thousand dollars to purchase campaign ads in support of their friendly legislator. Do you think it might be more difficult for a primary challenger to get their message out through the television station on the receiving end of the corporate largess?

Already, from coast to coast, people can turn on their radios and hear conservative talk for fifteen hours a day. The left has no answer to that. And it’s powerful! Democratic legislators spent their entire summer unsuccessfully working to knock down lies about death panels and government takeovers of health care. In a healthy media environment, those lies wouldn’t survive the day they were first uttered; the perpetrator of such a lie would find accountability delivered swiftly and decisively by an indignant and insulted Fourth Estate.

Instead, we’ve got a corporate-owned media whose highest allegiance is to profits (even at the expense of truth). Conflict sells. The tea-baggers, for example, made a great story. The ACORN controversy, a fraudulent controversy that was easily and quickly discredited, consumed countless hours of cable news. The obviously unqualified vice-presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, and shallow back-bench legislators like Michelle Bachmann, Joe Wilson and Steve King, drove news-cycle after news-cycle because they demonstrated a talent for effectively communicating conservative lies to the dregs of the national electorate. News executives didn’t choose these stories because they advanced the national debate; they were chosen because they were conflict-rich and entertaining.

The holding in Citizen’s United has just made a desperate situation that much worse. When media corporations have a fiduciary duty to maximize profit, allowing Exxon-Mobil, General Dynamics, Halliburton, JP Morgan and ADM to purchase unlimited electioneering advertisements is a recipe for disaster.

Already, the dynamics of the Senate telegraphed that progressives weren’t going to see the bold action they yearned for in terms of, inter alia, financial reform, global warming, health care and environmental protection. Sixty Democratic votes are very different from sixty Republican votes; as I said in a previous post, many of the Democratic Senators come from states that didn’t vote for Obama. Those Senators are obligated to represent their constituents and can’t (and shouldn’t) be expected to vote in lock-step with Bernie Sanders. One answer to the progressive conundrum is finding ways of more effectively conveying the Democratic message.

That’s going to be much more difficult to accomplish in the wake of Citizens United.