Dollarocracy (29 page)

Nonetheless, there were two revealing incidents in 2012. By law, commercial broadcasters have to keep records of political ad buys, including their cost, and show them to anyone who asks. With the massive growth of super-PACs and overall political advertising spending, many people had a newfound interest in seeing who was paying for all the political ads on their local stations. Traditionally, that has meant that citizens had to trek to a local TV station's office and stay there to peruse the files. “The notion of someone walking in and looking at pieces of paper—in the 21st century—it's ridiculous on its face,” public interest advocate Meredith McGehee said.
⁹⁴
The majority opinion in the
Citizens United
decision had stated that transparency on the Internet was
essential if the unlimited campaign spending it countenanced was not to be damaging to the electoral process.

FCC chairman Julius Genachowski, a Democrat, supported regulation requiring stations to post the material online so that citizens could more readily access it. But the broadcasters responded negatively, in part for fear that increased publicity might dampen the enthusiasm of some political advertisers to purchase spots. It “would ultimately lead to a Soviet-style standardization of the way advertising should be sold,” one executive stated. They also claimed the cost of transferring the material to digital form was onerous and could lead to annual expenses of between $120,000 and $140,000 per station.
⁹⁵

The FCC voted on party lines for an Internet political advertising database in April. Beginning August 2, television stations affiliated with the top four networks (ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC) in the nation's top fifty television markets were required to upload new political ad purchases to a
public database
. But as a Sunlight Foundation report noted, that left out “some 160 television markets, some of which are in battleground states.” Sunlight's research concluded, “In four of the nine states considered key in this year's general election—Colorado, Florida, Virginia, Ohio, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Virginia and Wisconsin—less than half of presidential ads would be disclosed on the FCC database.”
⁹⁶

The NAB attempted unsuccessfully in the U.S. Court of Appeals to stay the rule in July and then announced it was proceeding to court to have the rule formally overturned.
⁹⁷
The matter is to be taken up in 2013 if the NAB proceeds with the case. To the extent the matter received any digital or print news media attention, the commercial broadcasters were flame-broiled, not that it had any effect. “The hypocrisy of the media conglomerates, which (occasionally) insist on transparency in government but resist it themselves,” Dan Gillmor wrote for Britain's
The Guardian
, “is unsurprising.”
⁹⁸

The second incident concerned the massive influx of political advertising placed by third-party groups unaffiliated with candidates' campaigns. This posed a new dilemma for broadcasters. With regard to candidate ads, broadcasters could not check them for factual accuracy; they were protected political speech that had to run as they were. The news divisions of the stations could then criticize the content of the advertising if they found the material misleading or fraudulent. Not so with third-party political ads. Similar to commercial
advertisements, broadcasters could reject them or require them to provide evidence that they were accurate. And it wasn't really an “option.”

According to a 1971 ruling, the FCC should assure that stations must take “reasonable steps” to satisfy themselves “as to the reliability and reputation of every prospective advertiser.” If stations fail to comply, a 1978 court ruling determined, it might be grounds for a broadcaster losing its broadcast license. Viewers have a right to view ads on publicly owned airwaves that broadcasters believe are accurate and not deceptive. “The FCC has a long history of expecting stations, as part of their overall obligation to operate in the public interest, to avoid knowingly airing false claims in commercial advertising,” broadcast industry attorney Michael Berg wrote in
TVNewsCheck.
⁹⁹

In part because much of the funding for these ads was anonymous, the third-party spots tended to be blatantly bogus. “The level of inaccuracy in the third-party presidential ads has been high,” scholar Kathleen Hall Jamieson observed during the course of the campaign. One study showed that 57 percent of the money spent by the four biggest-spending third-party groups in Iowa was for ads containing misleading claims, the likes of which fast-food and automobile advertisers would have a hard time getting away with.
¹⁰⁰
The Annenberg Public Policy Center determined that 85 percent of the money spent on ads by the four biggest-spending third-party groups between December 2011 and June 2012 contained deceptive information.
¹⁰¹

Nevertheless, the commercial broadcasters punted when they were approached on the matter.
FactCheck.org
found not a single case of TV stations rejecting a third-party political ad or requiring third-party groups to verify the claims they were making in their ads.
¹⁰²
As the head of the Iowa Broadcast News Association concluded, “The test for accepting an ad is whether the check that pays for it is good.”
¹⁰³
The FCC punted, too, apparently not wanting to tangle with the broadcast lobby. “They're not going to touch that until after the elections, if then,” one activist on the issue informed us in the summer of 2012. FCC chairman Julius “Genachowski is afraid of his own shadow right now, especially when it comes to appearing to be too political in an election season.”
¹⁰⁴

With only minor exceptions, the general sense emanating from the 2012 experience was that, while just about everyone else thought the entire system was breaking down, commercial broadcasters were cashing in. And the responsible
regulators were watching from the sidelines. The Federal Election Commission was so ineffectual that there was virtually no significant penalty for breaking the rules. “The Federal Election Commission is a national scandal,” said Fred Wertheimer, president of the campaign-finance reform group Democracy 21. “We have no enforcement of the campaign-finance laws.”
¹⁰⁵
“The enforcement system is so weak, nonfunctional,” political advertising scholar Michael Franz put it, “that pretty much anybody can do whatever they want.”
¹⁰⁶

As we discuss in
Chapter 2
, the term used in much of the commentary was that it was a “wild west” environment. “We're no longer arguing what standards we should apply to political advertising,”
Washington Post
columnist Michael Gerson said. “We're starting to argue whether there are any standards whatsoever for political advertising.”
¹⁰⁷
Rolling Stone
's political correspondent Tim Dickinson concluded his examination of TV political advertising by noting, “The dirtier the system, the better for the bottom line at TV stations.”
¹⁰⁸
With the immediate stakes of winning an election, or making big bucks as a commercial broadcaster, hanging in the balance, the rational course is to shoot first and let the lawyers and lobbyists worry about any legal niceties later.

The corruption goes far beyond the flexing of lobbying muscle. Perhaps coincidentally, precisely as political advertising began to mushroom for commercial broadcasters, they began to lessen or even discontinue the manners in which they had covered political campaigns previously. The average number of free messages fifteen minutes or longer that broadcasters gave to presidential candidates, for example, fell from sixty in 1952 to twenty in 1972 to five in 1988 and, as far as we can tell, to zero thereafter.
¹⁰⁹
Party convention coverage has shrunk; what were from the 1950s to the 1970s major civics lessons for Americans have become vacuous, scripted events. Candidate debates are rarely shown on commercial television, and commercial stations increasingly do not carry
any
debates except for three presidential and one vice presidential debates.
¹¹⁰

Consider the 2010 U.S. Senate race in Wisconsin. Incumbent Russ Feingold offered to debate his millionaire opponent in forums across the state. It sounded like a great opportunity for Republican Ron Johnson, who had never sought
or held public office and had little record in public life. Johnson could have had equal footing with the three-term senator he was trying to unseat—an opening that challengers historically have sought. But Johnson, who scrupulously avoided interviews with newspaper editorial boards that might have given a sense of where he stood, refused the debate offer.

Instead, he let his advertisements and those paid for by the Chamber of Commerce, American Action Network, and sundry organizations that flooded the state with anti-Feingold ads do his talking. Even when Johnson did participate in the three traditional candidate debates available for broadcast by the state's TV stations, some stations avoided airing them in prime time. These same stations were broadcasting Johnson ads around the clock, including the period when the debate was taking place. Wisconsin lawyer Ed Garvey, a former Democratic nominee for governor, tried to tune in to a much-anticipated Feingold-Johnson debate, only to find it was not being aired. He called the station and was told he could track it down on a Web site. “As a citizen, I was left with no option but the ads. I got nothing of substance from television stations,” griped Garvey. “I thought they were supposed to operate in the public interest.”
¹¹¹

Most ominously, the amount of news coverage of political campaigns on commercial television, never much to write home about, has fallen precipitously over the past three decades.
¹¹²
Thomas Patterson noted that the amount of network TV news coverage of campaigns plummeted from 1992 to 2000 alone.
¹¹³
By the new century, the average commercial television station had long been providing far more political advertising during a political campaign than it did news coverage of the campaign.

In a hotly contested U.S. Senate primary race in New Jersey in 2000, $21 million was spent on TV ads, but the stations receiving the ads averaged only thirteen seconds per day in news time on the race.
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One study showed that in states with competitive Senate races in 2004, four times as many hours were given to ads for the race as were given to news coverage of the race. Another study of the 2006 election found a similar pattern.
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“Local television news in most communities is unashamedly show business, not journalism,” communication scholar Michael Schudson wrote in 1995, “and devotes only the slightest amount of airtime to local electoral candidates and issues.”
¹¹⁶

A study of eleven local media markets in 2004 determined that only 8 percent of the 4,333 news broadcasts in the month preceding the election
had even mentioned a single local race. The same newscasts had eight times as many stories about accidental injuries as they did local races during this month.
¹¹⁷

Indeed, the pathetic and appalling state of broadcast campaign coverage no longer requires academic research to be established; it is on a par with stating that people no longer tend to use the telegraph to communicate. One acquaintance we know who was running for governor of a Midwest state as a Democrat in a general election complained to a TV station manager that his campaign was not getting any news coverage. “You want to get on the air?” the broadcaster replied. “Buy an ad.” Whether intentional or not, commercial broadcasters have little incentive to give away for free what has become a major source of profit for them.

In 2010, the Pew Research Center reported that broadcast news remained the most important source of news for Americans, with 78 percent of Americans turning to local TV on a typical day.
¹¹⁸
If there is a public-service component in commercial broadcasting, this is likely where it is to be found. How well are the broadcasters converting their revenues from political ads into quality campaign journalism?

By 2012, the ongoing tragedy was now a farce. The amount of resources going to broadcast journalism fell sharply in recent years. A
Columbia Journalism Review
study of a “hard-fought congressional primary near Scranton, PA, found that six local stations aired some 28 hours of political ads, and only a half-dozen news reports, over nearly eight weeks.”
¹¹⁹
And it is not just the quantity, but the quality as well. Much of what little local TV broadcast news campaign coverage remains is superficial, focusing on polls, predications, and spin. Actual hard reporting is increasingly rare.

Some of TV coverage of campaigns actually uses political ads as the basis of news stories. “Releasing a single ad often drives millions of dollars in publicity,” Wilner wrote. “A provocative ad can accomplish its mission without a single dollar behind it. Compare that with product marketing, where there's no free lunch.”
¹²⁰
Vanderbilt political scientist John Geer noted, “Ads now are not just aimed at voters. They are aimed at journalists.”
¹²¹
TV news embraces this role, publicizing TV ads, especially negative ones, and assessing how much political impact the ads are having as the basis of the shows' political journalism.

Whole cable programs are devoted to “deep, searching” discussions of particular ads; television loves the visual and the chance to “cover” campaigns without ever leaving the studio. This is an ideal way for corporate broadcasters to cover politics: it is cheap and easy to do, takes no particular skill or intelligence, reaffirms that the Commercial is King, and reminds candidates that the path to news coverage goes through the ad sales department. Each of the examples of negative presidential ads in
Chapter 4
—from the Daisy ad and Willie Horton to Swift Boats—gained far more attention from the TV news coverage of the ads than the ads themselves generated. It is now part of the strategy in the money-and-media election complex to use ads strategically to drive or shift news coverage.