Former 'Times' editor: Campaign finance reform means TV reform
New York Review of Books nybooks.com
10:19 am Jan. 20, 2012
The New York Times' former executive editor, Max Frankel, takes to the New York Review of Books to float a proposal to end the mud-slinging in campaigns:
As a political reporter and editor, I concluded long ago that efforts to limit campaign contributions and expenditures have been either disingenuous or futile…But I believe that a large degree of fairness could be restored to our campaigns if we level the TV playing field. And given the television industry's huge stake in paid political advertising, it (and the Supreme Court) would surely resist limiting campaign ads, as many European countries do.
With so much campaign cash floating around, there is only one attractive remedy I know of: double the price of political commercials so that every candidate's purchase of TV time automatically pays for a comparable slot awarded to an opponent. The more you spend, the more your rival benefits as well. The more you attack, the more you underwrite the opponent's responses. The desirable result would likely be that rival candidates would negotiate an arms control agreement, setting their own limits on their TV budgets and maybe even on their rhetoric.
But how could we enact such a double-fee-for-fairness rule?
Ideally, Congress would make it a law, calling it a tax for democracy and daring the Supreme Court to strike down a scheme that actually produces more speech. But wool incumbents in Congress really vote to give their challengers a fairer shot? Probably not.
So, the next best thing would be for the Federal Communications Commission to use its power over the airwaves and the TV spectrum to impose the double-fee scheme…
Our communications are controlled by so few media corporations that it shouldn't b difficult to target them with focused demands for such a reform.
And targeting media companies isn't as difficult as it used to be.
