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Wall Street may lean Republican this presidential election cycle, but the New York media world is staunchly Democratic.

All the major media companies, driven largely by their Hollywood film and television businesses, have made larger contributions to President Barack Obama than to his rival, former Gov Mitt Romney (R-MA), according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit, nonpartisan Washington-based research group that publishes the Open Secrets Web site. The center’s numbers represent donations by a company’s PAC and any employees who listed that company as their employer. Even companies whose news outlets are often perceived as having a conservative bias have given significantly more money to Mr. Obama. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, for example, has contributed $58,825 to Obama’s campaign, compared with $2,750 to Romney. The conglomerate, which owns Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post and the 20th Century Fox studios, gave roughly the same amount to Romney’s Republican primary competitors Rick Perry and Ron Paul as it did to Romney.

[Commentary] We may never know if a wireless carrier decides to use control over text message donations in order to reward or punish a candidate because of the position that candidate takes on an issue. The problem is that even the threat could have a subtle influence on policy decisions, and those threats can be hard to track. That is why it is critical for the Federal Communications Commission to recognize that text messaging deserves the same protection as voice calling. Today, no campaign worries that crossing a wireless carrier will result in its phone number being disconnected. Going forward, no campaign should have to worry that text message donations will end because of a policy disagreement.

The political conventions, which kick off on August 26 when Republicans will gather in Tampa, will be a battle for more than just the presidential candidates. Cable news networks are making major pushes to use the quadrennial events to expand, shore up or win back audiences for the rest of the campaign.

The stakes for all cable convention coverage have been getting bigger: Cable news networks nearly doubled their convention audiences between 2004 and 2008. They've also been closing the gap with broadcast TV, which has continued to shrink the amount of time it dedicates to the gatherings. But the conventions may matter most this year to third-place CNN, whose ratings hit a 21-year low in the second quarter. The conventions could prove critical to the network's effort to regain viewers heading into the election.

In January, several tech companies aided by a groundswell of support from communities across the Web fought to derail a pair of online piracy bills — and won. Since the fight against the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP (Intellectual Property) Act ended, there’s been a lot of discussion about where, exactly to direct all that energy.

Reddit and the site’s co-founder Alexis Ohanian have an idea: they’re launching a bus tour that will introduce the Internet itself as a player in the 2012 election. “The bus will be half-red and half-blue, with ‘Internet 2012’ on the side of it, where the candidate’s name would be,” Ohanian said. The tour kicks off in Denver, Colo. — the site of the first presidential debate — and will conclude in the city that hosts the first vice-presidential debate, Danville (KY). It may be an old-school tactic, but Ohanian and the other members of his tour are doing more than taking a road trip. They’ll be on a mission to get protections for Internet openness into the platforms for both parties, meaning that they want to see politicians commit to preserving free expression, access and privacy online.