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Campaign Reform as Censorship

Saturday, August 23rd, 2003

Thanks to “equal time” provisions, lawyers for late night television shows aren’t allowing writers and hosts to use material denigrating the grid of candidates — most notably Der Ah-Nold — because doing so might force them to grant air time to the remaining 130+ candidates.

I’ve also read that local broadcasters in California aren’t permitted to show Arnold’s movies in the run-up to the campaign, also due to “equal time” concerns.

Evidently not content with the extent to which the FEC tells broadcasters how to run their businesses, the good Sen. John McCain also wants to mandate that broadcasters grant significant time to “candidate-centered” or “issue-centered” programming, and that in the days leading up to an election, he wants to force broadcasters to sell ads to politicians at the lowest rates they sell to any other advertiser.

In effect, it’s an effort to make sure that the John McCains of the world get on TV more often, and that when they’re forced to pay to get on TV, they’re given the cheapest rates in town.

The funny thing is, McCain and his partner in censorship — Sen. Russ Feingold — had to find a new third co-sponsor for this bill to clean up politics after the original third author, Sen. Robert Toricelli, resigned in disgrace.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, August 23rd, 2003 at 2:54 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

4 Responses to “Campaign Reform as Censorship”

  1. #1 |  Flyer |  August 23rd, 2003 at 11:45 pm

    Radley, I’m not sure how TV works, but my experience in the radio business is that broadcasters are already forced to sell time to candidates at “political rates,” the lowest rate available for the campaign period. This was in Louisiana, but I believe it was a federal requirement. It played holy heck with our spot availability, but usually resulted in a windfall for sales reps like me. Of course, this was also about four years ago and i don’t know how requirements have changed, but I’m certain they haven’t made it easier on broadcasters or tougher on candidates.

  2. #2 |  clay |  August 25th, 2003 at 11:14 am

    Living in Phoenix, I’ve noticed that every year that McCain is up for election, a couple of the independent tv stations will make a point of showing “Hanoi Hilton” several times in the month prior to the election.

  3. #3 |  Mark S. |  August 25th, 2003 at 10:35 pm

    I appreciate McCain’s attempts at a Fair and Balanced media. However, I’m getting just a little tired of government encroachment upon the press. And yes, I do mean press because every television station, regardless of the content, is a form of the press. They may not reflect the news of the day but they do reflect the culture, passions, concerns, and ideas of our time and that is as much freedom of speech as reporting on the war in Iraq.

    Preventing certain types of content on TV is one thing (which I’m not thrilled about either) but MANDATING what specific content is delivered is crossing the line. Just because TV stations and radio stations must get licenses from the government, it does not give us carte blanche to mandate the content of their programming. Citizens who care to learn about the candidates will always seek out sources of information whether those citizens are rich or poor. McCain is proposing that the government abuse it’s control of the airwaves in order to reach the apathetic masses.

    *sigh*

    Hooray, another win for Team Encroachment!