Dollarocracy (30 page)

So where has local TV news been in covering some of the great political stories of our times, the ones that directly involve them? How has TV news fared in examining the massive influx of cash into the election process, as well as the veracity of the TV political ads broadcast? As the
Columbia Journalism Review
noted, local TV stations have an “obligation, given the ad saturation . . . to stay on top of this spending spree.” They must also cover “when and how the ads mislead.”
¹²²

Research during the 2012 campaigns provided comprehensive answers to these questions, and, to be sure, they took no one who ever watched television by surprise. The media reform group Free Press conducted comprehensive examinations in several swing states of how local TV news covered the role of outside third-party money in the states' political campaigns. These were all stations flooded with political spots from such groups, much to the dismay of their viewers. In Milwaukee, for example, there were no stories on any of the seventeen groups buying massive amounts of airtime before the recall election of Governor Scott Walker. But in the same two-week period, local news programs aired fifty-three stories on Justin Bieber. In Cleveland, the four network affiliates did no stories on the Koch-brothers–funded Americans for Prosperity, although that group placed five hundred anti-Obama attack ads on the same stations. In Charlotte, between January and August 2012, the three top-spending third-party groups spent $4 million for their ads at the network-affiliated stations. Those stations did zero stories on these three groups.
¹²³

Another Free Press study, this time in Denver, compared the amount of coverage local news shows gave to the five biggest-spending third-party groups
with the amount of time those groups' ads ran on the same stations. The conclusion: for every 1 minute Denver TV news reported on these outside groups and their ads, the same stations ran 162 minutes of ads from these groups.
¹²⁴
“In other words,” journalist Edward Wasserman wrote, “the funders of political advertising appear to have purchased not just air time, but immunity from media scrutiny.”
¹²⁵
As the Sunlight Foundation's Bill Allison noted, local TV news has a “huge conflict of interest” when it comes to examining these subjects. “Broadcasters have an incentive not to see the system changed.”
¹²⁶

Deep into the campaign, the Pew Research Center determined that only one in four Americans had heard “a lot” about outside third parties involved in the 2012 election, and that the balance of Americans had heard little or nothing on the subject. (A mere 2 percent of Americans thought the outside money had a positive effect on the election process.)
¹²⁷

Even if third-party money was a new development in American politics by 2012, the notion of TV news (or news media more broadly) fact-checking ads has a longer pedigree. By the early 1990s, leading scholars like Jamieson argued elegantly that the news media could do a decent job policing TV political advertising to prevent candidates from misleading voters. Jamieson acknowledged that was a tall order in view of the pervasiveness and persuasiveness of the spots.
¹²⁸
But, Jamieson argued, “fact-checking matters. The act of fact-checking does tend to improve accuracy in political ads and it helps voters learn.”
¹²⁹

In the past decade, the bottom dropped out of that cup. To some extent, it was due to the shrinkage of traditional print media newsrooms. It was also due to the explosion in the number of ads, which were far beyond what even a large reporting crew could monitor effectively. “With a literal flood of advertising expenditures in contested battleground states,” Darrell West wrote in 2010, “the ability of journalists to oversee candidate and group claims plummeted. . . . Journalists have relinquished that traditional role and left candidates to police themselves.”
¹³⁰

As the 2012 campaign came to a close, Jamieson was reduced to pleading with television and radio outlets that “benefited from unprecedented levels
of political ad spending this year to “increase their scrutiny of every non-candidate ad they are offered, rejecting those containing deceptions and protecting the public by using the power of their newsrooms to inform, contextualize, and debunk.”
¹³¹

Local TV news, conflicted as it is, gave an especially deplorable performance in fact-checking ads in 2012. In the examination of Denver, Free Press determined that there was more TV news fact-checking of political ads there than in any of the other communities it examined. The Fox affiliate, for example, ran a “Fact or Fiction” segment once or twice per week on the local news in the summer and fall anchored by veteran reporter Eli Stokols. But Stokols had no illusions about this periodic examination of political ads. “While campaigns are quick to cite such fact-checking spots in their effort to discredit opposition advertising,” he wrote,

           
the campaigns we call out for blatant falsehoods don't seem to care at all. And why should they? In a campaign that could see close to $1 billion in campaign spending, it's inevitable that any TV ad, however false or misleading, will air hundreds of times, overwhelming any news outlet's fact-check that might air a couple of times. . . . The fact-check itself becomes part of a countering ad, just more noise in a never-ending echo chamber of allegations and attacks.
¹³²

At every one of the Denver stations that did do fact-checking in their news of the ads, Free Press found that the stations nonetheless “kept airing ads that their reporters found were false or misleading.” Free Press concluded that the “sheer amount of advertising has drowned out the few attempts to evaluate the ads' veracity.”
¹³³

The same thing happened at WTSP in Tampa, where the station's reporters teamed up with PolitiFact to assess the credibility of TV political ads airing in the community. They gave an attack ad from Americans for Prosperity their lowest “Pants on Fire” rating. They did so, PolitiFact's Angie Holan said, “because it's so misleading, and it's ridiculously false.” Nonetheless, WTSP aired the spot 150 times in the month following the report. “If the station's own news team says it is false, and they keep running it, you have to question the station's commitment to the audience,” Free Press policy director Matt Wood said.
¹³⁴

Indeed.

It is difficult to review the commercial broadcasters' performance and not react like Dan Gillmor, who said one of the “great scandals” is how “television
is complicit in this thoroughly corrupt system.”
¹³⁵
Or Bill Moyers and Bernard Weisberger, who asked, “When was the last time you heard one of the millionaire anchors of the Sunday morning talk shows aggressively pursue a beltway poohbah demanding to learn about the perfidious sources of secret money that is poisoning our politics?”
¹³⁶

Americans now take their predicament for granted, and many wade though the sludge of election campaigns in a state of despondence and depression, if they are paying any attention at all. How refreshing to hear words like these of Marty Kaplan: “Imagine what democracy would be like if elections were more than cash cows for local TV stations selling ads, if they were more than profit centers for conglomerates whose business model is monetizing the attention of—that is, entertaining—audiences. Imagine if campaigns really were what we deserved: great national conversations about issues and choices.”
¹³⁷

Just imagine.

THE DISCUSSION IN this chapter leads to several questions: First, why does television get the preponderance of political advertising in an era when people are spending more and more time online? Put another way, has the system of television political advertising already reached its peak, and is it facing an inevitable decline? In 2012, the answer was clear: “Online is how you preach to the converted,” Goldstein explained. “TV is how you reach the undecided, the passive viewers of politics.”
¹³⁸
“When it comes to political advertising,”
AdWeek
wrote, “digital is still just a sideshow.”
¹³⁹
As Eli Pariser put it with regard to the Internet, “The state of the art in political advertising is half a decade behind the state of the art in commercial advertising.”
¹⁴⁰
Goldstein said one of digital's main functions at present is for “fundraising so that a lot of money can be spent on TV.”
¹⁴¹

At some point, however, the audience for television almost certainly will decline sufficiently that the money will begin to flow in different directions. By Election Day, more than a few politicos were wondering if “voters [might] become so tired of the messages, most of them negative, that they begin to tune them out.”
¹⁴²
The transition from television to digital appears inevitable; it is only a matter of time. Whether this will lead to a weakening of the money-and-media election complex or, as with commercial advertising, the money will simply flood whatever new arena emerges, possibly in a more insidious
manner, is another matter altogether. In
Chapter 8
we assess the extent to which the Internet has altered the system to date and what the indications are for it to do so in the visible future.

Second, nearly every scholarly treatment of political advertising and commercial broadcasting acknowledges the defects we highlight in this chapter and in
Chapter 4
. Indeed, we draw much of our critique from this research—and from the very public crack-up that was the 2012 campaign. Some of these scholars, however, are sanguine about political advertising's role in American democracy. Their defense of political advertising invariably assumes there will be a credible political journalism—a viable Fourth Estate if you will—that will provide an effective counterbalance to political advertising, if not provide the preponderance of political information to the citizenry. After all, research repeatedly confirms that political ads “are most effective with less-engaged voters.”
¹⁴³
If the United States has a high-quality political journalism, the ability of bogus and destructive TV spots to dominate campaign discourse will be sharply reduced, if not eliminated.

But television journalism has all but abandoned its duty to provide fact-checking and thorough reporting as a corrective to political advertising. This puts increased pressure on the balance of the news media to do yeoman's work to protect the integrity and vitality of the political culture. Are the news media doing their job satisfactorily? To the extent they are not, where does that leave matters?

These are the questions we turn to in
Chapters 6
and
7
. We will not keep you in suspense: the news is not good.

There are in the body politic, economic and social, many and grave evils, and there is urgent necessity for the sternest war upon them. There should be relentless exposure of and attack upon every evil man, whether politician or business man, every evil practice, whether in politics, business, or social life. I hail as a benefactor every writer or speaker, every man who, on the platform or in a book, magazine, or newspaper, with merciless severity makes such attack.

                    
THEODORE ROOSEVELT, “THE MAN WITH THE MUCK RAKE,” APRIL 15, 1906

O
n the eve of the critical CBS
News/National Journal
debate among the candidates for the Republican nomination for president in the fall of 2011, CBS News' political director, John Dickerson, was notified that Congresswoman Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, a conservative firebrand who had won the Iowa straw poll and continued to mount a credible if not front-running campaign for the party's nod, would be available to join an online discussion following the debate. Dickerson indicated that he would prefer to “get someone else” because Bachmann's poll numbers had dropped “nearly off the charts.”
¹
Fair enough. Journalists get to choose whom they want to talk with. In an e-mail sent to his colleagues, Dickerson announced that the congresswoman was “not going to get many questions” in that evening's debate.
²

Sure enough, when the eight Republican contenders took the stage in Spartanburg, South Carolina, that night, Bachmann was passed over by the moderators, again and again and again. Instead, attention was lavished on the front-runner of the moment, Herman Cain, whose candidacy would crash and burn before the lights were flipped on for the first Iowa caucus, and on the best-funded if least-loved candidate, Mitt Romney. It was fifteen minutes into the debate before Bachmann got a question. She never got any follow-up questions. Indeed, she was so marginalized that press reports from the high-profile event barely mentioned her presence. And she wasn't alone on the sidelines. Former Utah governor Jon Huntsman, who as a former U.S. ambassador to China brought unique skills and qualifications to the race, was so neglected that night that when a question finally came his way, Huntsman expressed relief, saying, “It gets a little lonely over here in Siberia.”

But in the high-stakes game of presidential politics, this was no laughing matter. It's devastating for credible candidates who, though they might be down in the polls at the moment, are denied an opening to reintroduce themselves at a point in the race when voters are beginning to focus seriously on the contest. Bachmann complained about the neglect, and she had no trouble making the case that it was intentional. Why? Dickerson had mistakenly hit “reply to all” when sending his “not going to get many questions” e-mail, and “all” included Bachmann's communications director. The Bachmann team went apoplectic, with the candidate declaring, “Clearly this was an example of media bias.” Her aides complained that their candidate had been victimized by the dreaded “liberal mainstream media elites[, who] are manipulating the Republican debates by purposely suppressing our conservative message and limiting Michele's questions.”
³
We're not so sure about that. There were plenty of conservatives on the stage at the
CBS/National Journal
debate, and they got plenty of opportunities to mouth right-wing talking points.