> Bribery is not advocacy.

The revolving door is bribery, but now propose a solution to it that doesn't preclude every member of a politician's extended family from having a job in private industry regardless of whether that person had any say in their relative running for office.

Running issue ads pretty much the definition of advocacy.

> That argument also only works for the media industry and not the other countless industries which bribe government. The oil and gas industry have been getting their money's worth

The industries that it does work for are some of the biggest problem ones. Media consolidation is a major long-term problem that the government seems entirely incapable of redressing, and the same issue presents with tech companies. Twitter/Facebook/Google at this point have more influence over what people believe than CNN/MSNBC/Fox News.

Moreover, influence over the media is only one way that corporations influence politicians. Let's take your example. From soup to nuts, the US oil and gas industry employs more than 10 million people, and those people are concentrated in specific places. (This is also why coal in the US is dying and never coming back; employs less than 1% as many people.) The auto industry employs another 10 million Americans and has a strong preference for cheap gas.

The major alternatives to oil and gas are electric vehicles (majority of worldwide EV batteries made in China) and solar panels (made in China again). The US could make those things, but it would require significant taxpayer subsidies, since China subsidizes them too. Moreover, it will never be the same number of jobs because EVs and solar panels are simply less labor intensive. EVs are mechanically simpler and require less maintenance/repair than ICE powertrains and solar panels are essentially semiconductor manufacturing, which is not a major source of blue collar jobs.

Meanwhile the main argument against oil and gas is CO2, which is a huge international problem that countries have a poor incentive to tackle individually. So the political incentives to address it in the US are screwed regardless of whether the industry pays the politicians a cent, because the politicians don't want to lose millions of jobs and billions in tax revenue (which, despite the subsidies, the oil industry still pays on net).

More to the point, it's the media that keeps telling people that it could be fixed with campaign finance reform, even though it can't, because that's the one that privileges them as the ones who can run advocacy pieces without paying a third party to air them.

Whereas to actually make a dent in the part of the problem related to money being used to pay for attention, you need something more like antitrust so that you don't have megacorps like Comcast NBCUniversal, Google and Facebook in control of what such a large proportion of the public believes. Which is exactly what the media corporations don't want, so they redirect blame onto something else.