Exempt Media Attacks Bloggers ... Again
Captain's Quarters
The Exempt Media has decided to take another whack at bloggers and the exercise of free speech, this time in the Washington Post. Brian Faler writes in tomorrow's edition about the upcoming Congressional action exempting bloggers from the FEC's upcoming Internet regulations, and his article heavily emphasizes the notion that bloggers can serve as Trojan horses for political campaigns:
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The FEC requires candidates to disclose their expenditures, including any payments to bloggers, in periodic reports to the government. Some bloggers also disclose their financial relationships with candidates, but they are not obliged to reveal those payments, and the agency recently said it is not proposing requiring them to do so.
Some election law experts want the FEC to reverse that policy, saying it gives campaigns the opportunity to use ostensibly independent blogs as fronts to create the illusion of grass-roots support, mount attacks on their opponents and disseminate information to which candidates do not want their names attached.
"The concern is that somebody is blogging at the behest of a campaign and nobody knows it," said Richard L. Hasen, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who maintains a blog on election law.
"If, for example, you are a U.S. Senate candidate and you have a blogger who you're paying to write good things about you and bad things about your opponent, it will eventually come out. But that may not come out until after the election," Hasen said.
"But even if it comes out, there's something to be said for having the information right there, so when you click on the Web site you see it says 'Authorized by Smith for Congress,' " he added. "Voters rely on those pieces of information as cues in terms of how much stock they should put in what someone is saying."
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Of course, this is why I urge people to fight for complete and immediate disclosure of all contributions and disbursements as the only effective campaign-finance reform possible. If campaigns had to disclose that information as they went along -- on a weekly or even a monthly basis -- then we would know who got paid what money and for what reason almost immediately, not when it's too late to make judgments about it. It would put an end to the necessity of 527s and such silly distinctions between "hard" and "soft" money, and the cash would flow directly to the candidate, who would then have no choice but to take responsibility for how it was raised and spent. Instead, we have politicians like John McCain who pass legislation supposedly taking the money out of politics while having his campaign staff remain at his beck and call through their employment at Reform Institute, funded by left-wing groups and individuals such as George Soros.
Funny that Brian Faler doesn't write about that, or that Professor Hasen doesn't appear terribly concerned about it either. McCain and RI took in over $100,000 from George Soros in 2004, and like amounts from other leftists groups, while Thune paid a couple of bloggers a few thousand as consultants. Which of the two poses a greater danger of corruption to the political process? I suppose we should feel flattered that the Post considers blogging to have such an impact on politics that merely hiring a couple of local bloggers made the difference in the campaign -- even though they wrote the same type of posts before they were hired as afterwards.
This article wants to scare people, and Congress, into fighting the proposed exemption for bloggers by creating a strawman of rampant corruption in the blogosphere that doesn't exist. Even if campaigns decided to start "buying" bloggers, it would only reflect their ignorance of the marketplace. After all, why buy what one can get for free? Most of us write for our own purposes, not that of a candidate or party, and what revenue we need to justify our expense and time we generate through advertising. Buying a blogger might be more arguable for disclosure simply as a sign of cluelessness.
The so-called reformers reveal themselves again as more frightened of the power of free speech and the inability of former media elites toe control the information flow. They want to regulate us into silence and clear the field for the Exempt Media to once again tell people what to believe. Fortunately for the rest of us, those days have long since gone by.
Posted by Captain Ed
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