Rising electric bills and data center construction spark bipartisan pushback from governors, but restricting AI infrastructure could cost America its lead.
Page A5From§Eachthe coffee break edition — 31 August 2026
Cable's centrist cheerleader draws a paycheck from Big AI as data centers move to decide the next president
As it ran on the front
You ever notice how the guy on television telling you the centrist is the safe, reasonable choice never mentions who signs his other check. There's a piece out this week naming a cable regular who spends his airtime cheerleading centrist Democrats and, in the same stretch of career, draws a paycheck from Big AI. Not a coincidence, a business model. You put a friendly face on a screen, he tells you the moderate is the grown-up in the room, and nobody in the audience knows the same guy has skin in whichever party keeps the data centers zoned, powered, and untaxed.
And here's the part that should bother you even if you don't care about cable news at all: the data center fight isn't some side issue. It's being reported, straight, that the fight over where these things get built, who pays for the power, who eats the water bill, could decide the next president. That's the stakes. Not a metaphor. The actual outcome of a presidential election, tangled up with server farms, and the guy explaining politics to you on television has a foot in both rooms and discloses it in the fine print, if at all.…
…(cont) This is the con, and it's not complicated: you don't need to bribe a pundit to say something false. You just need him to be quiet about the true thing that would change how his segment lands. He doesn't have to lie about the centrist candidate. He just has to never mention that the industry deciding the next election also signs part of his invoice. The silence does the work the bribe used to do.
And the people who lose in that arrangement aren't abstract. It's whoever's town gets the data center and the light bill that comes with it, whoever's kid goes to the school district that didn't get the tax base because the facility got a carve-out instead. The guy on cable isn't going to bring that up between segments. He's got a paycheck riding on the conversation staying exactly where it's comfortable, which is nowhere near the receipt.
“You ever notice how the guy on television telling you the centrist is the safe, reasonable choice never mentions who signs his other check. This one champions moderate Democrats every night and draws a paycheck from Big AI, and the data center fight he never brings up could decide who's in the White House next. Follow the money and the segment lineup lines right up.”
“His commentary and his client work are entirely separate, he discloses what's required, and frankly viewers understand pundits have day jobs. The data center angle is a different industry story, it's not — well, it is the same guy, but the segments don't overlap, so.”
The receipts
Former Rep. Max Rose helps lead an influential network intervening in Democratic primaries — while quietly advising a tech-funded political operation targeting AI regulation.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.