Ralph Nader has a funny definition of consistency. On Sunday, appearing on GE-owned NBC’s “Meet the Press” — a program funded by corporate advertisements and carried on corporate cable and satellite feeds around the world — he criticized the two major parties for kowtowing to their “corporate paymasters.”

Yesterday, he ran the corporate press and broadcast table — and boasted about it on his Web site. He revisited NBC to appear yesterday morning to appear on “The Today Show.” Went on Disney-ABC’s “Good Morning America.” Appeared on AOL-Time Warner’s CNN for “Inside Politics,” hit Microsoft-GE outlet MSNBC for “Hardball,” and returned to CNN at day’s end for an interview on “Paula Zahn Now.”

And how did potential voters get to see his official announcement at a press conference this morning? Live on C-SPAN 2 — a channel created by the American cable television industry, which gives the people a pipeline to the Congress in painful detail, every single day it is in session.

Doesn’t Mr. Nader read his own Web site? “The mass media in the United States is extremely concentrated, and the messages that they send are too broadly uniform. Six global corporations control more than half of all mass media in our country: newspapers, magazines, books, radio and television. Our democracy is being swamped by the confluence of money, politics and concentrated media.”

But the uniform concentration of “mass media” doesn’t seem to have prevented Mr. Nader from getting a platform to get his message out. Indeed, anyone with a television at the end of the day yesterday would have to wonder what Mr. Nader could possibly be complaining about.

One of many reasons Mr. Nader’s message will never resonate with more than a tiny sliver of the American population is that ordinary people understand that corporations create jobs, wealth, and innovation. They distribute Mel Gibson’s version of the Gospels and Janet Jackson’s nipple, Ralph Nader and President Bush. They develop life-saving medications and time-saving conveniences. They organize human creativity and ambition to accomplish things that individuals cannot accomplish on their own. Their scandalous motive in all these pursuits? Profit. And Mr. Nader surely has enough experience with the press to understand — even if he won’t acknowledge it publicly — that despite the specter of mindless minions marching in lockstep to the orders of the almighty dollar, stations and newspapers and Web sites are run by individuals — by journalists, editors, and producers with their own brains, ambitions, standards, strengths, and weaknesses.

But for now, there is something amusingly hypocritical about Mr. Nader using corporate megaphones to raise the volume on his claim that the “concentrated media” is somehow swamping our democracy.