“It’s my hope that we’re going to get comprehensive disclosure requirements for corporations and labor unions, and from intermediate groups that are used as pass throughs, and from the people that are spending the money. But on top of all of that, investigative reporting above and beyond the disclosure information has an important role to play. These are very hard stories to do, and in the past there hasn’t been a lot of appetite among editors for taking the time to do investigative stories that may be very time consuming, but they’re essential now,” says Wertheimer. “It’s straightforward, and basic, and extremely important.”
Campaign Desk
02:21 PM - February 5, 2010
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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