Campaigns, TV, Radio, and Money
Wisconsin just finished a particularly nasty Supreme Court election. Now begins the retrospectives on how special interests soured the campaign and made it nasty. In the case of this election, private interests spent $5 for ever $1 the candidates spent. While I’m not particularly opposed to regulation addressing some of this, I want to go in a slightly different direction. This could end tomorrow if people really wanted it ended. The problem is people don’t want it ended.
No, I’m not speaking of people boycotting stations or any other such nonsense. The stations themselves are well within their rights to refuse 3rd party interest ads, or even ads from candidates themselves. The only way stations could get in trouble is if they acted inconsistently. Considering that many stations offer local news 4 or 5 times daily, I think they could easily make the argument they are fulfilling their obligations to the public interest, which is part of their licensing. There is one reason and one reason only for the filth put out there and that is the greed of the station owners.
The natural counter argument is that people shouldn’t be denied the airwaves as a forum to air their grievances. Good gracious, why shouldn’t they? Most sane people don’t have an issue denying the airwaves to Holocaust deniers. And the public interest groups whose opinions people may care about don’t even use the airwaves to distribute their views. The NRA predominantly uses direct mail. AARP does some TV, but it also has its own network for reaching its members. In politics, TV and radio air time are predominantly for fly-by-night organizations to offer their messages under the impression that they represent someone other than a few cranks with money. Part of having a public trust is denying the use of public resources to those who seek to destroy it.
For the record, my ox wasn’t gored because I don’t vote for judges. I think the practice is repugnant and against the interests of law and justice.
Comments are closed.
Let’s leave aside the question of whether judges should be elected or not. Assuming that an office is going to be elected, what is wrong with third parties advocating the election or defeat of a particular candidate?
I don’t have an issue with 3rd party advocacy per se. If it were the NRA, AARP, or NAACP using the public air waves, my objection wouldn’t be so strong. To analogize this a little bit, it is like church basements. I don’t have an issue with an AA meeting there, but I would if the Klan met there. The church is a steward of that space. In the same respect, broadcasters are stewards of the air waves they have been given licenses to broadcast, and they fail in that stewardship when they offer air time to those who would use it poorly.
I have no problem with a TV station refusing to run ads by the Klan. The question is how the ads run the Wisconsin Supreme Court race are like ads run by the Klan. Were the groups behind the ads burning crosses on anyone’s lawn? Presumably not. So wherein lies the similarity?
I should add that two of the bigger offenders were WEAC and WMC, teachers and business associations respectively.
No, no crosses were burned. The similarity would be that the respective groups do(did) things that the public finds repulsive.
What did the WEAC and WMC do that people found so repulsive? Run ads that people didn’t like?
Yes
Not only did the public disapprove of the ads, the candidates themselves explicitly stated they didn’t like the ads, even when they were the beneficiaries.
Interesting. I’d love to see public pressure for a voluntary ban on all political TV ads not approved by the candidates themselves.
But I disapprove of elections in general so I tend to favor anything that’ll reduce what I see as overinvestment in political campaigns.
I guess I don’t see the fact that TV stations are running ads people don’t like as being a major problem (even where the candidates themselves don’t like them). And I suspect that despite what people might say, the ads don’t really bother people *that* much. If they did, they presumably they’d do something about it (like not watch so much TV), and that would stop the ads pretty quickly.
If they did, they presumably they’d do something about it (like not watch so much TV), and that would stop the ads pretty quickly.
I’m not sure where this presumption is grounded. Many people take unpleasurable commutes everyday not because they are lying to themselves but because other things mitigate against that negative. It isn’t like people enjoy commercials anyway. The thing they and the candidates have done is publicly complained, which is admittedly cheap. They have also been generally supportive of campaign reform proposals.
It’s not a question of whether people like campaign ads, or long commutes; the question is whether they dislike them enough to do anything about it. A person may complain about his long commute, but if he continues to do it, that suggests, as you say, that the benefits he gets from living far from work outweigh the cost of the commute. In the case of TV, the costs of avoiding political ads (or ads in general) are so minimal that if people continue to watch them it can’t be the case that they repulse people all that much.
You’re probably right that support for campaign finance reform is motivated to a significant extent simply by annoyance at political ads, rather than by any high ideals about democracy. But the fact that a lot of people support banning something, at least in the abstract, doesn’t tell me much about how much they dislike it. Talk is cheap.
this is off-topic, but today is the three year anniversary of john paul ii’s death and there is not a single post on him…