Other institutions also lost influence to corporations. Patients learned about new drugs from advertisements rather than from their family doctor or local pharmacist. Churches and faith organizations, which had been an arena for social interactions, and sometimes offered critiques of unrestrained markets, lost parishioners to the mall, or decided to endorse wealth as the new virtue. Labor unions declined in membership and political influence. In the mid-1950s, more than a third of U.S. private sector workers belonged to labor unions; by 2005 this had declined to less than 10 percent. Political parties, in the past a limited avenue for popular participation in politics, became increasingly professionalized and subject to the influence of wealthy campaign contributors and lobbyists.
The mass media, at times a powerful critic of corporate excess, also came under the control of big business. Large media conglomerates such as Disney, National Amusements, Time Warner, Viacom, News Corp., Bertelsmann AG, Sony, and General Electric took over television, radio, book publishing, movies, music, and other media and often shared directors or owners with other companies, reducing any impetus for journalistic investigations of harmful corporate practices. Later, the Internet, increasingly dominated by big corporations and advertisers, replaced more intimate and face-to-face forms of communication.
Together, these changes helped clear the playing field for the amplified corporate voice that Lewis Powell had urged in his memo. As the public-interest movements that had alarmed Powell and his allies waned in the late 1970s and especially after the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, big business again became the dominant voice in social and economic policy and politics, as it had been in the 1880s and 1920s.