Before the Web blacked out to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) — the Internet-censorship bills that faced massive opposition online — there was another SOPA blackout. This one came courtesy of the TV news networks, which almost uniformly ignored SOPA and PIPA until it was impossible not to.

A Media Matters report showed that in the run-up to Jan. 18, when Wikipedia, Google, Reddit and other big sites joined millions of Internet users in one of the biggest online protests to date, only CNN mentioned SOPA and/or PIPA in its nightly news coverage.

Meanwhile, ABC, CBS, Fox News, MSNBC and NBC were silent. Not surprisingly, the corporate parents of these news outlets — Disney, CBS Corp., News Corp. and Comcast, respectively — were supporters of the bill. Since 1989, these companies have spent a fortune — nearly a billion dollars — lobbying for favorable legislation in Washington.

Now another Media Matters report shows how much these corporations spent on lobbying in the fourth quarter of 2011 — just as the SOPA/PIPA fight was heating up.

While it’s hard to suss out exactly how many dollars went solely to lobbying on SOPA/PIPA, a picture of financial influence emerges when you look at the numbers:

Combined, the organizations spent $182,500 on lobbying contracts with firms that lobbied solely on SOPA/PIPA, and an additional $2,022,500 on contracts with firms that lobbied on SOPA/PIPA in addition to a range of other issues.

Comcast, Disney et al. are probably none too happy about spending up to $2 million on bills that have since been shelved indefinitely. Maybe they should have funneled the money into things like fixing NBC’s failed Wonder Woman pilot.

Photo credit: Pen Waggener via Flickr