Over the last two weeks, reporters covering campaign finance have ably chronicled the scope and effects of the bitterly divided Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.
They’ve filed stories reporting that decades, perhaps a century, of regulations governing campaign finance have been rolled back, and that corporations would now be entitled to spend unlimited amounts of money in support of any candidate they desire. Observers predict a weakening of party organizations, and a massive new cudgel for lobbyists seeking to influence legislation.
Those are big changes to the money in politics beat, which point to a fresh question: What new stories or obligations present themselves to political reporters and editors working in this new era of money and politics?
For the most part, campaign finance watchers say, the changes will mostly be related to scale. With more corporate money (and speech) poised to enter the fray, traditional watchdog reporting will become even more important.
In the meanwhile, there remain plenty of open questions about the decision’s full impact and legal attempts to stem it. Tracking their resolution will be fertile ground for stories. Congress and the President have floated various proposals—ranging from a constitutional amendment to more modest legislative patches—to undo the ruling’s broadest effects. Eight justices (all but Thomas) agreed that government could continue to regulate disclosure of the newly allowed expenditures.
“With the ruling coming down, and the ruling being so fresh there are absolutely more questions than answers about how this is going to play out in reality,” says Dave Levinthal, the spokesperson for the Center for Responsive Politics, a campaign finance watchdog group.
“You have corporations like AT&T and Microsoft who have generally played both sides of the political aisle and have in their donations given to both Democrats and Republicans and have not really played favorites,” says Levinthal, pointing out the tightrope that awaits corporations that are perhaps interested in influencing an election, but wary of antagonizing either party through their spending.
“A lot of corporations right now are probably having frank and interesting discussions around how they want to use this,“ says Levinthal, a former politics reporter for the Dallas Morning News. “One great story might be trying to get ahead of the decisions they are going to make, and asking local companies how they anticipate using this before they do.”
Mary Boyle, communications director for Common Cause, says that journalists at all levels need to reemphasize their roles as arbiters of facts.
“You only see some of the major newspapers doing these kind of fact-check boxes on ads that candidates run. But this opens up a whole new arena around corporate ads,” says Boyle. “There’s going to be a lot of he-said-she-said flying around, [and it’s] going to be very difficult to make something out of it, to draw conclusions that are based on reality.”
Boyle also points to the weakness of some current campaign finance disclosure laws, and suggests that even if legislatures put new rules together, corporations could still try to disguise their spending through trade organizations, front groups, and the like:
We are going to be seeing third parties getting involved with this. If Exxon is going to spend a million dollars, maybe they’re not doing it in the name of Exxon, maybe they’re doing it in the name of ‘Americans for More Alternative Energy’, or something…. Journalists are going to have to be really vigilant about this stuff and there are going to be attempts to hide this information in terms of whose paying for it, how much they’re spending, and what their agenda is.
Those sentiments are echoed by Fred Wertheimer, a longtime money-in-politics reformer who heads Democracy 21.
“I think it’s going to be essential, to put it in old fashioned terms, to follow the money here,” says Wertheimer. “Public disclosure only works if someone discloses the information to the public, and I believe that the media has a very big responsibly to help fill that role.”
I think it is possible that the impact of this decision on the commercial speech doctrine will be even worse (if such is possible) than its impact in the election area. There has been no dearth of corporate participation in politics for decades. it is possible that if anything, this decision will bring that participation more out of the closet and generate more outrage about a situation that is not new. (Check out the reporting on front groups by the Center for Media and Democracy. More journalists should have been covering the front group angle). What is perhaps more significant about the consequences of the strong statement of corporate personhood on the regulation of commercial speech (and by extension the regulation of commerce period). I predict that just as similar statements in Bellotti found their way into commercial speech cases, the rhetoric about the value of corporate participation will migrate into the commercial speech context where its consequences could be far reaching. What happens to the FDA's ability to control off-label use marketing, securities regulation, food safety, truth in lending? A a time when it seems more apparent than ever that we cannot trust the marketplace to deliver safe products, to deliver truthful information, etc. elevating commercial speech to the level of political speech seems unwarranted and dangerous. Yet that is precisely what I think this decision opens the way for. After all, if a for-profit corporation has speech rights we must confront that political speech is ancillary to its reason for being while commercial speech is its principal mode of expression. I have written extensively on this and to some extent expected something like this. It gives me more to write about. I would have been happy with less.
#1 Posted by Tamara Piety, CJR on Fri 5 Feb 2010 at 04:10 PM
It's a complicated ruling. No one wants foreign interests impacting elections. But this applies evenly to businesses, unions and even individuals. What impact does this have on media organizations?
The problem has become how to define the journalism. Is NBC, owned and operated by blatantly pro-Obama administration folks, neutral? Is it journalistic? If Comcast turns out to have a different agenda after buying NBC, is that political also and not journalistic?
Suppose a business now launches a media outlet that has an agenda -- let's say to promote tariffs. Is it journalistic? TPM and Huffingpost are not part of the White House press corps even though they are anything but neutral. Are they journalistic? Yet the traditional media focus only on their complaints about Fox. I've worked for lots of media outlets and only one -- Congressional Quarterly -- really managed to be a neutral arbiter.
So now with this ruling, businesses can easily do what labor unions and liberal groups have been doing for years -- launch media outlets or create movies and TV shows to push an agenda. The journalistic community needs to discuss the definition of journalism a bit more than in the past. Otherwise, how do you separate blatantly partisan outlets -- businesses, unions, think tanks, etc. -- from outlets that are striving to create more neutral content? Or will even the thin veneer of neutral content go away on a national level?
#2 Posted by Dan Gainor, CJR on Fri 5 Feb 2010 at 04:24 PM
You mentioned Comcast buying NBC. They need to be looked at for their business practices of charging over $70 per month for connection of anything over the broadcast stations, then charging $5 in that cost for a remote control that gives out but the customer must pay to purchase a new one that will continue to be charged that extra $5. Then to replace it, no one comes by, they must mail it 20 blocks--one post office-- that takes 5-7 days to get there. I can mail things to MD from CA for the same amount of time. They are doing their customers no favors but demanding a raise in cost every 6 months of approximately $1.68. Seven years ago I was charged $49.00. No wonder Comcast had the highest profit of any corporation in USA and was therefore able to,purchase NBC. They use the senior citizens and pensioned adults as their backbone.
#3 Posted by Patricia Wilson, CJR on Fri 5 Feb 2010 at 06:30 PM
Patricia, your complaints are chump change by comparison with the greed of the great liberal bastion of higher education. No one disputes that the cost of attending university has galloped along quite above the level of inflation - including the inflation in cable rates - for about 30 years. The response of supposedly concerned politicians is to expand student loan programs, happily feeding the beast. The fact that no news organization with substantial investigative resources has looked into why this agony has been perpetrated on middle class parents is one of the reasons that mainstream journalism is hopelessly shy about making liberal institutions look bad. Instead they get calls from their peers to investigate stuff like cable rates. Or gasoline prices, when they spike upward. Hey, surprise, they go down, too. Tuition, dorms, textbooks never do. Ever been curious as to why? You won't find this news fit to print in the NY Times. They won't attack a political ally.
#4 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Fri 5 Feb 2010 at 08:57 PM