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Politics : WHO IS RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT IN 2004 -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: calgal who wrote (7512)	12/13/2003 10:43:15 AM
From: calgal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10965

Supreme Court Ruling on Campaign Finance Endangers Press Freedom December 11, 2003 contact: Peter Flaherty 703-237-1970, 703-864-7902 cell www.nlpc.org Peter Flaherty, President of the National Legal and Policy Center, today reacted to yesterday's Supreme Court ruling on McCain-Feingold: (Washington, DC) Campaign finance "reformers" have succeeded in sucking more life out of the First Amendment. What they ignore is that all speech is the expression of ideas. The distinctions made between political and nonpolitical speech are largely a fiction, as are those between hard and soft money to finance politics. The attack on certain kinds of speech, and certain kinds of spending to facilitate it, is an attack on all speech. The media seem to love McCain-Feingold, but they'd better watch out because it could come back to haunt them. As sacred as even the reformers proclaim press freedom, all of their arguments in favor of McCain-Feingold could apply to political expression in newspapers. After all, aren't many newspapers now monopolies in their home towns, and aren't most owned by big corporations? McCain and Feingold apparently did not learn the lessons of the 1974 campaign finance overhaul. Whenever you try to dam up the river of campaign money, the river simply takes an alternative route. Big-time donors like George Soros have not put away their checkbooks. The perceived problems McCain-Feingold was designed to solve result from the earlier "reforms," amply demonstrating The Law of Unintended Consequences. One unintended consequence of McCain-Feingold may well be a growth in the number of newspapers, news networks, radio programs, and other media outlets financed by various political interests. An interest group or a politician would be prohibited from saying certain things in a newspaper advertisement that they could freely say on the op-ed page of that same newspaper, so political players would do everything they could to attain such exposure, even if it meant starting a brand new newspaper or network. The National Rifle Association is already in the market for a TV or radio station. I predict the campaign finance "reformers" will catch on very quickly, and inevitably try to restrict those forms of expression, too. The government would then start deciding which newspapers and TV programs are "legitimate," which journalists are "real," and ultimately which Americans may or may not have their views expressed in print or over the airwaves. The Supreme Court has taken another step down the road to tyranny. Peter Flaherty is President of the DC-based National Legal and Policy Center, a non-partisan foundation promoting ethics and accountability in public life. URL:http://www.nlpc.org/view.asp?action=viewArticle&aid=74