The FEC has assured bloggers that — for the moment, at least — their political posts and links are not considered regulable political expenditures in favor of a candidate.
Political bloggers would continue to be exempt from most campaign finance laws, according to highly anticipated rules that federal regulators released Wednesday.
The Federal Election Commission also proposed that online-only news outlets and that even individual bloggers should be treated as legitimate journalists and immune from laws that could count their political endorsements as campaign contributions.
The 47-page outline of proposed rules (click here for PDF file) takes a cautious approach to the explosive question of how Web sites and e-mail should be regulated, with the FEC saying throughout that its conclusions are only tentative ones and inviting public comment. The comment process is expected to be approved by the FEC at its meeting Thursday.
This whole kerfuffle started when an FEC commissioner suggested that political blogs which too closely toed a candidate’s line — linking to their website, forwarding their press releases — might be considered organs for political advertising, and thus subject to McCain-Feingold regulations.
The commission has generally been hands-off on the Internet. We’ve said, “If you advertise on the Internet, that’s an expenditure of money — much like if you were advertising on television or the newspaper.”
Do we give bloggers the press exemption?
The real question is: Would a link to a candidate’s page be a problem? If someone sets up a home page and links to their favorite politician, is that a contribution? This is a big deal, if someone has already contributed the legal maximum, or if they’re at the disclosure threshold and additional expenditures have to be disclosed under federal law.
Certainly a lot of bloggers are very much out front. Do we give bloggers the press exemption? If we don’t give bloggers the press exemption, we have the question of, do we extend this to online-only journals like CNET?
Well, gads, we can’t have that.
For those who think political speech is free, but that campaign ads should be restricted, here’s a nice slippery slope cautionary tale. Because, frankly, you can make that very case, and just because the FEC ruled now, and tentatively, that bloggers are off the hook, doesn’t mean that the principle that they are forever has been established. Once you begin to treat speech as advertising, and declare the latter as a legitimate target for regulation, the former is bound to follow in some fashion.
I think I’d be willing to deregulate political ads aside from two points:
1) Each and every paid ad would have to say who had paid for it. And not some “Committee for Truth, Justice, Puppies and Free Beer”, but the real people or corporations. If paid for by a PAC the PAC’s real, succinct track record would have to be stated; something like, “Paid for by the CTJP&FB PAC which supports the Republican Party 95% of the time”. The information would have to be in type just as large as most of the ad, and/or just as loud and just as slow.
2) Penalty for failure to comply would have to be substantial, something along the lines of fining them twice the cost of the ads or real prison time in real prisons.
I agree with full disclosure. I don’t think you could *have* ads that held all the information (especially when what stats were the “important” ones would be open to some debate and, like most measurements, manipulation). But full disclosure of who’s paying for it, with access (via web?) to specific recipients, amounts, and donors, seems reasonable.