From a mass emailing I received from Common Dreams:

In a 2012 interview with Bill Moyers, media scholar Marty Kaplan said, "The notion of spectator democracy has, I think, extended to include the need to divert the country from the master narrative, which is the influence and importance and imperviousness to accountability of large corporations and the increasing impotence of the public through its agency, the government, to do anything about it. So the more diversion and the more entertainment, the less news, the less you focus on that story, the better off it is. Bill Moyers responded: “Are you saying that the people who run this political media business, the people who fund it, want to divert the public's attention from their economic power? Is that what you're saying?” Kaplan responded: “Yes. Let us fight about you know, whether this circus or that circus is better than each other, but please don't focus on the big change which has happened in this country, which is the absolute triumph of these large, unaccountable corporations. This is about as dismal and effective a conspiracy, out in plain sight, as there possibly could be."