It’s time the press starts behaving accordingly. The media, for the most part, still treats elected officials as the key players in our political process. They get most of the scrutiny. Mega-donors, by contrast, are permitted a substantial degree of anonymity. Now that must change. If Adelson or the Koch brothers or their liberal equivalents can single-handedly shape presidential campaigns and congressional majorities, their pet concerns and ideological quirks deserve more journalistic attention than do those of most members of congress. It’s no longer enough to have one reporter covering the “money and politics” beat. Special correspondents should be assigned to cover key mega-donors, and should work doggedly to make their private influence public.

What Mother Jones proved by exposing Mitt Romney’s now-infamous 47 percent comment in 2012, and Huffington Post proved by revealing Barack Obama’s “cling to guns or religion” line in 2008, is that politicians offer their benefactors a candor they would never offer the public at large. This gap between the private and public campaigns must be closed. Every time a mega-donor hosts a fundraiser for a politician, journalists should do everything they legally and ethically can to find out what transpired. When television stations and op-ed pages give Beltway pseudo-scholars a platform, they should identify the mega-donors who pay their salaries. It’s relevant that Adelson, who helps fund the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies—a hawkish think tank whose scholars say new sanctions will help avert war with Iran—has called for nuking that country. It’s relevant that the Koch brothers fund some of the country’s fiercest climate-change deniers while Koch Industries ranks among the nation’s top air polluters.

Big donors will likely fund all this publicity unpleasant. Most would rather shape public policy in private. But the press has an obligation to follow power, to explain how our political system actually works, not to hew to a civics-class fantasy that less and less resembles reality. Since the Roberts Court is dismantling the legal obstacles that prevent America’s 0.1 percent from purchasing politicians, the press should erect cultural obstacles in their place. Our best hope now is massive scrutiny, and, hopefully, some measure of shame.

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