TV Political-Ad File Debate Moves to Whether FEC Disclosure Is Enough
The question of if the FCC should make all TV stations put political ad information on the commission’s website (CD March 2 p7) changed focus at least briefly to shine on another agency. The question is if 2002 campaign finance legislation solely makes the Federal Election Commission the place for such disclosure, or whether the FCC also has a role. The NAB said the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) doesn’t give the FCC authority to implement the FCC proposal to move political-ad files and much of the rest of public-inspection files from TV stations’ main studios to the Internet. A longtime advocate for such disclosure said the BCRA -- often referred to as the McCain-Feingold bill after its main sponsors -- doesn’t preclude the commission from acting, and few details about political TV spots are available in FEC filings.
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FCC staffers, meanwhile, continue working on an order that would require much of TV broadcasters’ public files to go online, commission officials said. They said work at the Media Bureau has slowed down (CD Feb 22 p2) as staff figures out how to proceed given broadcaster opposition. Staff may be trying to figure out how to incorporate a proposal last month from 11 station owners with more than 200 total TV stations for some but not all of what’s in political ad files to go online, agency officials said. The proposal would mean the amount of the lowest unit charge (LUC) for political spots aired shortly before elections wouldn’t be disclosed, something that has drawn opposition from nonprofits. A bureau spokeswoman declined to comment.
The act mandates the FEC, not FCC, “place certain election-related records on the Internet,” the NAB said late Thursday in supplemental comments in FCC docket 00-168 (http://xrl.us/bmxmsr). “By contrast, Congress did not extend this requirement to broadcasters’ political files. The clear implication is that Congress did not intend for broadcasters to be subject to an obligation to place their political files online and thus, the FCC lacks authority to impose such a requirement absent further legislative action.” The law says broadcasters must make political records “available for public inspection,” the association said. “Congress did not impose any associated obligation to make such records available on the Internet (either through a station- or FCC-hosted website)."
The NAB says campaign spending data from the FEC is “extensive,” which a nonprofit advocate for disclosure disagreed with. “Individuals, groups, political committees, or other organizations that purchase radio or television advertisements for electioneering communications must provide the FEC with the identity of any person paid in excess of $200 to produce or air that ad, including the person’s name and address, the candidate identified, and the date the ad aired,” the NAB said. “There is no need for duplicative disclosure” and “stations are not the entities placing ads,” it said. FEC filings don’t say what the LUC is or in what day parts political commercials appeared, said Policy Director Meredith McGehee of the Campaign Legal Center.
Many political-ad buys aren’t listed individually in FEC filings, McGehee said. She said campaign finance law requires the amount of covered payments be disclosed, so when campaigns or others pay ad buyers to purchase the commercials as is common practice, the filings would list the amount of money paid to that buyer and not what that third party paid a station. “The Alice in Wonderland view to use BCRA as a reason to continue to use paper files and make it harder to gain information is just bizarre on its face,” she said. Only a “mom and pop operation” would directly purchase campaign ads from a broadcaster, and so only in those instances would the details be in FEC filings, McGehee said. “The information that’s filed at the FEC and the information that the stations have in their political files are nowhere near the same.” An FEC spokeswoman declined to comment.
An economics professor who studies local media wonders if there’s “mission creep” in what the FCC proposal would require, because disclosing online LUC prices and other data doesn’t seem to show how well a station serves its audience. Researchers including academics “would like to have this data available because it would shed some light on the relationship between broadcasters and political candidates during the campaign seasons,” Prof. Steven Wildman of Michigan State University said. “A legitimate topic for research, but it seems to have little to do with how well a broadcast license holder performs with regard to behavioral standards.” The goal “seems to be to get broadcasters to contribute toward creating a database that would be useful for research on issues more connected to the development of various areas of communications law and policy, such as political advertising, rather than monitoring the performance of individual broadcasters,” he said. “Why broadcasters should be uniquely targeted for assisting in this mission is not clear.”