By: Mary Mostert, Analyst, www.originalsources.com
October 28, 1998
The Associated Press reported yesterday that "Paid political advertisements on local TV news shows outnumbered actual political news stories by better than 5-to-1 last week, according to a survey released Tuesday." The survey was conducted by Rocky Mountain Media Watch, a left-leaning watchdog group that surveyed 128 newscasts from 25 states Oct. 20-22."
"The pattern is that people are getting their election information from paid political advertising, and that's such a distorted, narrow view of the candidates," said Paul Klite, the group's director. "One of the ideas of the electoral process is to get to know these people. We're not."
The news programs surveyed contained 693 paid political ads and 171 political stories, Rocky Mountain Media Watch said. The political stories told most frequently concerned developments in President Clinton's sex scandal. Since the survey involved ads and news stories only through August, it didn't include the great deluge of political attack ads that have poured forth in September and October. While the group has no comparable study to show how the ratio of ads to news has changed over the years, the Television Bureau of Advertising said that political ads on TV this year had increased 35 percent over the last mid-term election in 1994.
"Two trends seem to feed off each other: Negative ads turn the public off to all politicians, and television news directors see research showing viewers aren't interested in political news, so they cut back on coverage," said Paul Taylor, executive director of the Alliance for Better Campaigns. "It just goes round and round," said Taylor, whose group tries to persuade TV stations to run more political news.
Rather than fight against free speech by urging local news programs to back off political ads, Taylor said he would prefer to encourage them to report more news. He is encouraging TV news shows to find more creative approaches of informing the electorate. Several programs, for example, run mini-debates between candidates by running their taped responses to questions about issues, he said.
But this idea has run into as much resistance from politicians as from news directors. "A generation of candidates have grown up in a world where they want to completely control and script any appearances on television," he said.
And who, do you suppose, has been responsible for creating a situation where candidates want to script any appearance on television? The media itself, of course. The millions of dollars that pour into political campaign coffers every couple of years ends up in the pockets of the media. In many ways, those political ads represent the bread and butter of the established media - newspapers, radio and television. If those millions were suddenly withdrawn the industrial age infrastructure of pre-information age media would be in trouble.
Computers took over the press rooms of the print media only in the last 15-20 years. Before computers, there was the Typographical Union and when computerized typesetting was introduced, the union typesetters fought it with every tactic they could think up. In Sacramento, for example, the Sacramento Bee was picketed for several years for permitting computers to "take the jobs" of typesetters.
Of course, in the end, they lost. Today, it appears, the print media is in no mood whatsoever to allow technology to further threaten its very existence and has adjusted itself to a new situation born largely in the rancorous period of Watergate when a Democrat controlled Congress passed one bill after another aimed at the Republicans. One of those bills was the Campaign Financing Reform Act of 1974 which gave us our current corrupt system. It was passed by Congress supposedly to end corruption by setting up a system of public funding of presidential primaries and national election campaigns.
The bill was promptly challenged in court and in 1976 in Buckley v. Valeo, key provisions of the bill were declared a violation of First Amendment rights. "It is clear that a primary effect of these expenditure limitations is to restrict the quantity of campaign speech by individuals, groups and candidates," the court said. "The restrictions...limit political expression at the core of our electoral process and of First Amendment freedoms." In spite of that decision, there are repeated attempts to limit First Amendment rights in other ways.
However, the established media learned to effectively limit First Amendment rights of candidates by slowly, over the years, cutting back and now almost eliminating any real reporting of what the candidates themselves are saying. What we have is a system of filters in which the media itself has become the message. To force candidates to purchase the time and space to get their messages out, the media has dramatically cut back the time and space that they once allocated for actual reporting of candidates own words. It is the media that has isolated candidates by no longer reporting their actual words. What we are getting today in the print media, and on radio and TV, is exactly what the left wing Rocky Mountain Media Watch found. No real reporting, but lots and lots of paid ads placed by political parties to manipulate the voters, liberally seasoned with interminable talk programs designed to entertain or to advocate, but never to inform. The bottom line, of course, is money. Today candidates HAVE to raise a lot of money because THEIR words are no longer free. They have to pay to get them heard or read.
It's taken awhile, but increasingly the American voter has come to the conclusion that he is not getting the facts, and has increasingly opted out of the system by simply not voting. Then another batch of "campaign finance" reforms is touted as the "solution." And what is the "final solution" proposed by Senator Feingold and Senator Glenn? They propose regulation of speech by outlawing so-called soft money contributions. Others propose a system of socialized politics - that is totally paid for by government funding. That would, of course, take us back to total government control even of the political system itself. ALL candidates would be under the thumb of incumbents.
So, what to do? If the media itself is the problem, how do we legislate a solution, without violating freedom of the press?
In my opinion, we don't. The solution is about to take place under our very noses without legislation. It's called "The Internet." Campaign reform is taking place unnoticed through candidate Websites.
Right after the California primary in June, after I had once again been deluged with telephone calls from friends and acquaintances wanting me to tell them how to vote in races where they knew nothing at all about the candidates, since they had gone unmentioned by our local radio, television and newspapers, I decided to personally address the problem. In July I created a Website where ALL candidate Websites could be accessed by office they were running for, giving the candidates, once again, the opportunity to get their messages in their own words to the voters.
I have been a bit taken aback by the response to date. At last count over 148,000 hits have been counted on my Website in four months, with no advertising. Of course, that's not a lot when you consider that more than 1000 candidates are listed, by state, on the Website, but it impresses me. It tells me that there are a lot of people out there who would turn off the attack ads and go read the candidates own words, if they knew where to find them.
So, I decided, this last week before the election, to place a small classified ad in various California newspapers to let people know that my Website exists. It says, "Your brain spinning with attack ads? Can't figure out who to vote for? Compare candidates' OWN WORDS on issues. Links to candidate Websites, all parties, all states." And then the Website address, http://www.originalsources.com. One of the papers I called the ad to was the massive Sacramento Bee, the daily paper of most of Northern California. A few hours after placing the ad, I got an e-mail from a Customer Relations Coordinator at the Bee saying, "The Sacramento Bee does not currently accept Websites that we consider to be competitive in nature." A call to the coordinator confirmed that in spite of my protest that the Website had been a labor of love, and so far it was all outgo and no income, from the Bee’s perspective I was their competitor.
While I was initially rather annoyed at still another media action which prevented the public from being able to access information that would inform them of candidate views, on second thought I guess it was a compliment that the multi-million dollar Sacramento Bee thinks I'm a threat to them. And, maybe I am. The election of 1996 was the first election on the Internet - and about 10% of the voters actually made their decisions based on information they got off the Internet. In 1998, that will probably be close to 20%. By the year 2000, an important Presidential election, millions more American will have access to the Internet and will be able to go to my Website and others like it to find candidates in all the races, making their voting decisions in the privacy of their own homes, with unfiltered information directly from the candidates themselves - just like it used to be in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, for example when it was just the candidates and the public interacting without paying for scores of spin doctors, ad writers, handlers, pollsters, and campaign strategists. Lincoln and Douglas debated, and their actual words were printed in the newspapers, without being "explained" and twisted by talking heads on TV or reporters and editors.
Once upon a time the news was free and the reporters, editors and typesetters were paid from advertising revenues of businesses advertising their products and services. On the Internet, news is free again. Candidates once again can tell their own story in their own words - and they are doing it. It is fascinating to see the tremendous difference between the attack ads on TV and what you find out by reading what the candidates are actually saying.
For example, in the bitter mud-slinging involved in the attack ads in the New York Senate race between Sen. Alfonse D'Amato and Charles E. Schumer, what are their real differences? There are no attack ads in either of their web sites. (See http://www.originalsources.com/Candidates/nygov.shtml) Sen. D'Amato provides the voters with detailed position papers on 36 different issues - everything from Agriculture to the Year 2000 computer problem. Schumer, who is Jewish, gives his position on seven issues. Both candidates deal with the issue on the Holocaust and Gold from Germany in Swiss banks. Schumer said in his statement on the issue: "For a long time the world believed that countries who claimed to be neutral, simply stood idly by as Europe and the rest of the world waged war on each other. The recent finding by our government shatter that misconception.
"When we learn that these so-called neutral countries trafficked in over five-hundred million dollars worth of German assets, three-hundred million dollars worth of looted gold, and were key suppliers of Hitler's war machine, it begs the question of what neutrality really is."
D'Amato, the first Italian-American Catholic to be elected to the US Senate from New York, was the person in the government who responded to an appeal by Edgar Bronfman of the World Jewish Congress, researched the situation and found "Unconscionably, the Swiss government turned over the assets--including life insurance policies--of Polish and Hungarian Jews who were presumed dead so that the Communist governments could satisfy and pay property claims made against them by Swiss citizens." Sort of made me wonder about Schumer's pitiful attempt to charge D'Amato with being "Anti Jewish" because he called him a Yiddish word meaning "foolish."
Both men were in the Congress when Bronfman made the appeal, but it was Catholic D’Amato who did the research and brought the Banks around to a settlement. I would think the Jewish constituents of New York State would think about that situation - if they know the whole story, and most probably don't. But, in two minutes, by comparing the two candidates' OWN words on the subject of the Holocaust and Nazi gold, the New York voters would learn a lot about the two candidates on the subject.
And, the cost of getting that information from the Candidate to the voter is pennies compared to the millions in the present system and it totally bypasses the spin doctors, the bias of reporters, editors, talking heads and media owners. Voters can decide for themselves, if they have accurate information. They don’t need the media moguls to tell them what to think about it. By the year 2000 I predict that having actual facts available to the voters on Candidate Websites, rather than the spin we are being deluged with today, will be REAL campaign finance reform. Most of the money being raised for campaigns goes to the media giants, who maintain outmoded, pre-information age buildings and systems left-over from the industrial age with the money. Much of the political turmoil we have today is based on inaccurate or at least very incomplete information. The facts, rather than so much opinion, might find better and more reasonable solutions to our many problems.
So, maybe the Sacramento Bee is right. Perhaps they understand better than I do that my little David Website could topple their Goliath Newspaper giant. I sure can’t blame them for not taking my $70 classified ad if they think it might wreck their multi-million dollar business.
To comment: mmostert@originalsources.com _