> If we had nothing to go on other than the volume of these bribes to say who had power and who didn't, I'd say...turns out, the media is pretty powerful.

That probably isn't the right takeaway from these numbers. The owner of a news network almost certainly makes a lot more money than a judge. The declining marginal utility of a dollar at high income levels implies that it will take a lot more to bribe a rich business owner than a middle class government employee, regardless of the actual value of services rendered.

You're also ignoring the issue of scale. The court system has thousands of judges but there are only a handful of major news networks. It looks to end up costing about the same amount to bribe all the news networks vs. all the judges.

Moreover, you're assuming that the entertainment business can dictate what the news business reports strongly enough to make the politicians care. But if that's the case then why aren't all the major news networks owned by oil companies and banks?

The reason copyright keeps getting extended is that there has been no organized well-financed opposition to it. Nobody with money is lobbying against it. It's not like it even benefits the industry very much! How much money is Disney really making on 100 year old movies? But the cost of extending copyright is paid by the general public who aren't organized enough to get their way, much as it is with all the other big industries that get their way at the expense of the population at large.