Don’t Hate Political Advertising—Profit from It.
INVESTMENT ANALYST SCOTT EYMER, 2012
Americans may recognize political ads as an annoyance, or even an entertainment, but the general managers of television network affiliates in communities across the United States understand them as something else altogether: a massive revenue stream. They are now such an important cash cow that television stations in early caucus and primary states and fall swing states plan presidential election years—and the years leading up to presidential election years—around the anticipated windfall. Political ads are no longer a quadrennial bonus; they are essential to the bottom line for old-school broadcast stations that have been hard hit by changing consumer tastes and digital challenges.
When confusion about the date for the Iowa Republican caucuses held up the flow of advertising dollars in the fall of 2011, the general managers and national ad sales directors of stations in Des Moines and Cedar Rapids and Mason City panicked. “We saw a little before the (summer) straw poll and then nothing till late November,” said Anne Marie Caudron, national sales manager of KCCI, the CBS affiliate in Des Moines. “We were”—long pause—“concerned.”1
Over at the ABC affiliate, WOI, general manager Russ Hamilton was more than concerned. When the ads did not come, he said, “We were all dumbfounded. I’ve been in this a long number of years, and we were like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’” Then the money spigots opened. Hundreds of thousands, then millions of dollars flowed into the accounts of Iowa stations—$1.4 million in the week before Christmas alone. “It feels like they combined November and December into one month of spending,” a gleeful Hamilton told the Washington Post.2
The money was moving so quickly—it would eventually add up to $102.20 per caucus goer—that some local managers grumbled about having to work over the holidays. Not Hamilton. The Post reported, “To minimize the chaos before a holiday weekend, affiliates closed their books on the purchases by Friday afternoon—except WOI. Hamilton said he would interrupt his steak dinner on New Year’s Eve and upload some more commercials if it meant more dollars.”3
It meant more dollars. A lot more.
In the 2011–2012 election cycle, $10 billion overall was spent on campaigns in the United States. Most of this spending went to pay for millions of television political ads.4 Some of that TV ad money went to advertising professionals and campaign consultants. But the lion’s share of the spending for TV political ads—90 percent, according to one report—went to purchase airtime on commercial television stations.5 The airtime was a scarce commodity, and if candidates wanted it, they had to be willing to pay commercial broadcasters . . . a fortune. For the broadcasters, this was manna: a massive infusion of income that required virtually no labor on their part other than to make a bank run to deposit checks. They were like Jed Clampett striking oil in the Ozarks.
Well, not exactly like Jed Clampett. Jed was hunting on his own land when he struck it rich. Local television stations hunt on our land.
Commercial broadcasters receive monopoly licenses to sections of the publicly owned broadcast spectrum at no charge. The law states that the fortunate few who are recipients of these monopoly licenses get them on a temporary basis as long as they serve the public interest. The law is based on the assumption that the primary public interest the citizenry has is seeing that the airwaves are used to promote fair and free democratic life with informed public participation. The foundation of an effective democracy is credible elections, and broadcasting on the publicly owned airwaves is singularly positioned to make outstanding elections possible.
In many countries, public and private broadcasters make real contributions to the process. But not in the United States, where the civic and democratic values imagined when the licensing system was developed have been trumped by commercial excess. The robust democracy imagined by Progressive reformers who sought to update the founding principles of the American experiment for the modern age seems less attainable than at any time in a century. Where once a poet like Whitman wrote glowingly of presidential elections as America’s “powerfulest scene and show,” our ablest interpreters of the national Zeitgeist now suggest that the process does “damage . . . to the American psyche.”6
“What we Americans go through to pick a president is not only crazy and unnecessary but genuinely abusive. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent in a craven, cynical effort to stir up hatred and anger on both sides,” wrote journalist Matt Taibbi on the eve of the 2012 election. “A decision that in reality takes one or two days of careful research to make is somehow stretched out into a process that involves two years of relentless, suffocating mind-warfare, an onslaught of toxic media messaging directed at liberals, conservatives and everyone in between that by Election Day makes every dinner conversation dangerous and literally divides families.”7
But it wasn’t all doom and gloom. As the election approached, newspaper business pages and broadcast industry trade journals were running celebratory headlines, proclaiming:
“E.W. Scripps Posts Profit on Political Ad Spend”8
“Political Boon Leads Gray to Up Estimates”9
“Election Money Fuels Big Gains for Scripps”10
“CBS Profit Climbs 16% as Political Advertising Boosts Radio, TV”11
“Sinclair Broadcast Earnings Rise in 3Q on Political Spending”12
“Politics Ads, Olympics Lift Belo 3Q Profit 81 Pct”13
Stock analysts noticed, counseling investors, “Don’t Hate Political Advertising—Profit from It.”
“Who will benefit the most from record setting political revenue?” asked investment analyst Scott Eymer in a fall 2012 column that ran beneath that headline. The answer: “A wide array of businesses profit from political spending, from advertising agencies and marketing companies to media outlets. But especially in 2012 and for the next several weeks, those publicly traded television groups with a coverage footprint which include local markets in battleground states will achieve spectacular political revenue. This is a onetime shot of significant cash flow, all paid in advance.”14
Station owners and investors pocket most of the “spectacular political revenue.” But a portion is diverted to lobbying against campaign-finance reforms that might affect the “significant cash flow.” So it is that while thoughtful Americans fret about the damage done to our national psyche by media excess in the election season, media companies aggressively lobby for more, much more, of the same.
In many other democracies, where commercial broadcasting plays a smaller role and public broadcasting is relatively large, paid TV political advertising plays little or no role in the campaign process. There is no great commercial lobby that so greatly profits by ever-increasing amounts of TV political ad spending. Not so here. “In one of the great perversions of the Constitution foisted on its subjects by its overlords,” Bill Moyers and Bernard Weisberger wrote, “the public airwaves where free speech should reign have become private enclosures to which access must be bought.”15
This chapter follows the money and goes where the bucks stop. It is here, arguably, that the corruption and cynicism of the money-and-media election complex are most revealing.
In contrast to the rest of the democratic world, the United States adopted a commercial—for-profit, advertising-supported—radio broadcasting system in the late 1920s and 1930s. There was strong opposition to the commercialization of the airwaves at the time—a heterogeneous array of Americans fought diligently but unsuccessfully for a significant nonprofit and noncommercial broadcast sector in the 1930s. But not even the harshest opponent of commercial broadcasting could imagine our airwaves being used for political advertising.16 Indeed, during the 1930s when Congress routinely considered radio regulation, the commercial broadcasters were lavish with free airtime for politicians and candidates from both major parties. Even socialists like Norman Thomas received airtime from NBC. And Franklin Delano Roosevelt, never a favorite of the media owners, broadcast thirty “fireside chats,” ranging in length from fifteen to forty-five minutes, on the nation’s new radio networks between 1933 and 1944.17
During this period, when their control over the system was under review, the commercial broadcasters went out of their way to establish that they could be trusted with a central role in the modern political process. For the next two decades, the commercial stations were careful not to appear to favor either political party and equally careful to give a sense that providing access to candidates was a key part of their public-service obligations. There was considerable criticism of how halfhearted the commercial broadcasters’ election activities actually were during these years, especially by the late 1940s and 1950s, but by twenty-first-century standards the radio and later television networks might look as if they were being managed by the League of Women Voters.
When the radio networks were granted control over television by the Federal Communications Commission, candidate advertising began in earnest, but it took a long time to get to where the system is today. In the 1950s, political advertising had almost no impact on broadcasters’ profit margins. In the 1960s and 1970s, TV candidate advertising was still a minuscule slice of total TV advertising revenues. By the early 1990s, the revenue numbers nudged up to where political ads accounted for around 2 percent of local TV station revenues, and a decade later TV political advertising was between 5 and 8 percent of total local station TV ad revenues.18 In 2012, political advertising accounted for around 20 percent of TV station revenues.19 In some key markets in swing states, local TV stations gained as much as 35 percent of their revenues from political advertising. Confirming a line from former New Jersey senator Bill Bradley, election campaigns were indeed beginning to “function as collection agencies for broadcasters. You simply transfer money from contributors to television stations.”20
Political advertising has become a staple of the commercial broadcasting industry and the indispensable basis for its profitability. It is a dream business as it requires little or no sales force to shake the tree, and the money is paid in advance. Even before the 2012 campaign was under way, Wall Street stock analysts could barely contain themselves as they envisioned the growing cash flow. “Voters are going to be inundated with more campaign advertising than ever,” one investor service wrote. “While this may fray the already frazzled nerves of the American people, it is great news for media companies.”21 As Carl Salas of Moody’s Investors Service put it, “Virtually all U.S. broadcasters will benefit from spending on political ads in 2012.”22
The matter was probably put best by Eric Greenberg, a partner of Paul Hastings Janofsky & Walker LLP, who regularly represents broadcasters in the buying and selling of television stations. A twenty-year veteran industry insider, Greenberg was blunt about the business model of commercial television: “Political advertising and elections are to TV what Christmas is to retail.”23 Keeping with the holiday motif, one public-interest advocate said, “Election season has turned into Black Friday for broadcasters. . . . It’s just a huge bonanza.”24
The 2012 election exceeded even the loftiest forecasts. As Election Day approached, Erika Franklin Fowler, codirector of the Wesleyan Media Project, said, “2012 will go down as a record pulverizing year for political advertising.”25 The advertising manager at Iowa’s KCRG-TV9 could barely contain himself. “It’s just light years different” compared with 2008, said Steve Lake.26
Ironically, years earlier Congress tried to stop price gouging of candidates by commercial broadcasters. It passed legislation requiring that in the sixty days before Election Day, presidential and Senate candidates had to be given the lowest rate the station had charged for similar spots in the previous year. That proved entirely ineffectual in 2012. First, much of the action took place before the fall: prior to the 2012 party conventions, political candidates and groups already accounted for half of the top twenty TV advertisers.27 Indeed, the early advertising was central to Obama’s reelection strategy, as postelection reviews of the campaign revealed.
“(Obama) framed the race in the summer as a choice between fairness versus tax cuts for the rich,” explained a Brookings Institution analysis. “Using attacks on Romney’s finance background at Bain Capital and failure to disclose tax returns, and GOP proposals to cut income taxes by 20 percent, Democrats characterized Romney as a rich and out-of-touch businessman who had little understanding of the economic plight of ordinary Americans. By the fall, many voters believed Romney would protect the rich while Obama would help the middle class.”28
Second, at least half the TV political ads came from third-party groups, which were not eligible for the low rates. A majority of pro–Mitt Romney ads came not from the Romney campaign but from supposedly “independent” groups. As a result, ad rates at local TV stations, especially those in swing states, shot through the roof. “Stations can and will charge outside groups as much as they dare,” Kantar Media’s Elizabeth Wilner noted. These groups have “a willingness to pay whatever it takes.”29
This meant commercial advertisers were then faced with vastly higher rates for the same amount of advertising. One station in Bismarck, North Dakota, for example, estimated its rates were fully three times greater in 2012 than they would have been had it not been an election year.30 The giant Sinclair Broadcast Group announced that its political ad revenues tripled its expectations. “The political business . . . is an ever-expanding business,” Sinclair’s giddy CEO David Smith proclaimed. “I don’t see any evidence that it’s ever going to go away.”31
There are three important consequences of the tidal wave of political advertising money that has flowed into the coffers of commercial broadcasters. The first consequence is that all of this spending means TV viewers were absolutely drenched in political commercials, especially in swing states for presidential ads and wherever there was a contested Senate race. “For people in those battleground states and battleground markets,” Kenneth Goldstein of the Campaign Media Analysis Group said, it was “all campaign ads all the time.”32 One Boston advertising agency executive termed it “a snowstorm on TV of commercials like we’ve never seen.”33 The 2012 campaign saw nearly 4 million spots on local TV stations, almost double the 2008 level of 2.3 million local spots, and there would have been many more if there had been additional time available.34 In the critical battleground state of Ohio, 207,518 presidential campaign spots ran during the course of the Obama-Romney race.35
“So many political ads. So little time. What’s a TV station to do?” That was how the Washington Post’s Paul Farhi framed the dilemma facing stations across the nation, especially in battleground states.36 Longstanding policies not to show competing political ads back to back and not to air political ads during news programs—a standard that had been established in order to defend the integrity of newscasts—were abandoned everywhere. Indeed, local news programs became among the most desired slots in the schedule.37
One study of the Columbus, Ohio, CBS-TV affiliate’s evening newscast found twenty-two consecutive political ads in one half hour; another observer counted forty-five consecutive political ads on another evening’s newscast on the same station.38 The Washington, DC, Fox affiliate went so far as to temporarily add a half hour to its 6 PM newscast simply to accommodate the flood of political ads eager to be on a local news program. The ABC affiliate in our nation’s capital shaved time from some of its shows to create more space for political ads.39 But political ads quickly filled all day parts, and cable TV channels and cable TV systems saw large increases in their political ad sales as well. Comcast’s vice president for political advertising—yes, now an executive position!—said many of the major cable TV channels reached “maximum density” thanks to the surge in political ads.40
Even this analysis barely conveys what it felt like to countless Americans in the summer and fall of 2012. Research by Kantar Media comparing the number of presidential TV political ads for one week in August in 2004, 2008, and 2012 in several American cities was revealing. The Las Vegas market had 867 such ads in 2004, 925 in 2008, and 2,870 in 2012. Orlando had 153 spot ads in 2008 and 1,863 in 2012. What about 2004 in Orlando? Zero ads, and that was during a competitive year for Florida as well. Columbus, Ohio, in arguably the most contested swing state of modern times, had 608 spots during the same week in August 2004. In 2008, the number was 832. In 2012, the total was 1,842. And these figures were just for presidential ads. According to Wilner, the increase in the number of presidential ads in swing states ranged from three to twelve times greater than the levels in 2004 and 2008.41 As one reporter put it, people were “drowning” in ads.42 But the ultimate confirmation of how bad things had become came from the man who won the presidential race, Barack Obama. More than two months before the election, Obama joked, “If you’re sick of hearing me approve this message, believe me, so am I.”43
The second consequence is that the popular antagonism toward political advertising, which has always been significant going back to the 1960s, absolutely exploded in 2012. And it wasn’t just in Iowa and other battleground states that the revulsion was rising. Polling data, anecdotal statements—the works—all confirmed that voters across the country had by Election Day reached the conclusion expressed by Sheree Dierdorff, a Maryland voter who said of the advertising onslaught, “It’s such a waste of time and money.”44 Dierdorff was interviewed while waiting in line to vote on a gambling referendum. But what she wanted to talk about on Election Day was the nightmare of political advertising. Her proposal: “a law that limits politicians and political action committees to broadcasting ads only in the three weeks leading up to Election Day.”45 Our bet: Americans of all political views would leap to approve Sheree Dierdorff’s fix.
Evidence suggests that disdain for the political carpet-bombing of America with commercials in the run-up to elections transcends partisan and ideological lines. Indeed, it may well be that in this extraordinarily diverse nation, the one thing that unites all Americans more than anything else is their unanimous contempt for TV political advertising. (The other possible candidate: the deeply held conviction by most Americans that their local TV news is the worst in the nation.) As one New York State newspaper editor put it in the heat of the campaign, “I never thought I would look forward to seeing erectile dysfunction ads return to my living room.”46 Two frustrated Omaha pharmacists became local cult heroes when they sprung for and produced a parody of a TV political ad suggesting that “getting your teeth drilled is preferable to one more political commercial.”47 When Prime Minister of Britain David Cameron appeared on David Letterman’s CBS show in September 2012, he received his loudest applause when he explained that Britain did not permit paid political advertising.48
But it is no laughing matter, especially to the commercial broadcasters. This overwhelming antipathy to what campaigns have become provides broadcasters’ one great concern: that public anger might provide enough ammunition to get reform measures passed that would slow down or end the gonzo profits they are making.
The third consequence of this flood of ad dollars is that it could affect the structure of the industry. Broadcast analyst Greenberg expects that due to political advertising being so “huge,” there will likely be another wave of mergers and acquisitions among TV stations.49 This enhances a core concern in democratic theory: that media ownership should be diverse and competitive so as to prevent bottlenecks over the flow of information. Indeed, the one form of broadcast regulation that had real teeth from the 1940s to the 1980s was a commitment to strict broadcast station ownership limits. For most of that period, even the mightiest firms were permitted to own only five TV stations. The majority of local TV station revenues was controlled by a large number of relatively small regionally based firms. In the 1980s and 1990s, ownership regulations began to be relaxed under pressure from the largest media firms, the ones that owned the broadcast networks. By 2012, a single company was permitted to own as many TV stations as it could afford until that ownership extended to audiences accounting for 39 percent of the American population. But that’s an official fantasy. The system is riddled with corporation-induced loopholes and waivers, such that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation–owned TV stations actually reached 45 percent of Americans by 2007.50 A handful of other giants have emerged to build similarly expansive TV empires. Some of these firms—News Corporation, Comcast, Disney—are media conglomerates with vast interests in film, newspapers, digital ventures, and publishing. They rank among the one hundred largest companies in the nation.
This is of particular importance because as the dominant television-owning firms get larger, their lobbying prowess only increases. And it is not as if commercial broadcasters were ever laggards in that department. The industry trade association, the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), has been renowned as far back as the 1930s for its obsession with and near-total dominance over Congress in legislative matters. After all, commercial broadcasting is a government-created system of monopoly licenses granted at no charge to publicly owned property; controlling the various branches of government is central to the business model. The extent of competition is set by government policy; there is nothing “free market” in the equation at all. In addition to traditional business power, however, commercial broadcasters also controlled how politicians were covered on radio and TV, and how debates over broadcast policy issues were covered in the broadcast media. Consequently, few, if any, politicians wished to tangle with them.
Merge this traditional strength with the conglomerate power of a Comcast, a News Corporation, or a Disney, and the result is a political leviathan. The commercial broadcasting lobby determined decades ago that nothing would interfere with the golden spigot of TV political advertising. Today the matter is foundational to the industry’s very existence. Yet its influence is rarely noted. Whole discussions about the barriers to campaign-finance reform can play out without mention of the most powerful force agitating against reform. We have a permanent lobby for a broken status quo. These “deformers,” as clean politics advocate Ellen Miller referred to them, actually argue, “We need more corporate spending—not less.”51 And they tell us that what has developed is a natural state of affairs for American democracy. They are wrong.
America does not have a political process built on mounds of money and millions of negative commercials because Americans chose this circumstance, and certainly not because it developed organically from the founding of the Republic to the airing of the last attack ad. The politics we have today is the result of choices made over many decades. Much of the analysis of these choices focuses on campaign-finance reform legislation and judicial rulings, but choices with regard to how a media system develops are equally important. And equally definitional.
Research demonstrates that in those democratic nations with well-funded and prominent nonprofit and noncommercial broadcasting systems, political knowledge tends to be relatively higher than in nations without substantial public broadcasting, and that the information gap between the rich and the working class and poor is much smaller.52 Stephen Cushion’s recent research confirmed this pattern and noted that public-service broadcasters tend to do far more campaign reporting than their commercial counterparts. One of Cushion’s conclusions is especially striking: those nations that have maintained strong public broadcasting continue to have better campaign coverage (e.g., news about policy that can help inform citizens about the relative merits of a political party or a particular politician). Moreover, the effect of strong public broadcasting is that commercial broadcasters tend to maintain higher standards than they have in nations where public broadcasting has fallen off in resources and campaign coverage.53
As with their global counterparts, U.S. public and community broadcasters have routinely done a better job of covering political campaigns than the commercial news media do. It is there that viewers are most likely to see debates or see in-depth interviews with candidates, even obscure candidates. But here the marginal status of American public media, combined with budgets that are microscopic on a per capita basis compared to those of nearly all other advanced democratic nations, means that the public media election coverage has considerably less substance and influence than it might otherwise. And the serious budget cuts public media have taken in recent years make their ability to do even rudimentary coverage far more difficult. But it is worth noting that in the recent past, leading American politicians understood that public broadcasting was a key to credible democratic politics in the United States, as elsewhere.
The time was 1967, a period of great tumult, and President Lyndon Johnson was vexed by a concern that had troubled him for more than a decade: a sense that American democracy needed to be repurposed to meet the new economic and technical demands of the television age. So it was that the most powerful man in the world devoted long hours to assuring that, instead of having American politics defined by commercial broadcasting, Americans would define the intersection of media and politics so as to reinforce “the bedrock of democracy.”54
To that end, Johnson became determined to return to the fight that had been lost in the 1930s and establish a muscular public and community broadcasting system that would “be free . . . be independent and . . . belong to all of our people.” We already discuss in Chapter 1 the remarkable campaign-finance initiatives of the Kennedy and Johnson eras and how close the United States came to a bipartisan consensus in favor of clean politics. For the purposes of this chapter, and the broader discussion about the role television plays in our politics, we focus briefly on the thirty-sixth president’s equally remarkable attempt to create an “American BBC.”
Johnson was a man of politics and media, a veteran of more than twenty-five years in the U.S. House, the U.S. Senate, the vice presidency, and the presidency. His family controlled a Texas radio and television empire that began with an Austin radio station that would eventually be dubbed “KLBJ.” Readers of the epic biographical series penned by Robert Caro are well aware that Johnson used his political influence to build that broadcast network and his media influence to build his political career. But Caro readers are also aware that Johnson was a far more complex thinker—and doer—than might be suggested by the stereotype of the uncouth powerbroker stealing elections or threatening reporters.55
Like a striking number of world leaders in his moment, Johnson understood that at a point where developed nations were forging their futures in “the white heat of [a technological] revolution”—to borrow of a phrase from British prime minister Harold Wilson—governments were called upon to frame and shape the role those technologies would play in future societies.56 And technologies that could define the political debates of a great nation—be they broadcast or digital (and both Wilson and Johnson were fascinated by the emergence of the computer)—were a particular concern.
Johnson put it another way in his speech ushering in a new era of public and community broadcasting:
It was in 1844 that Congress authorized $30,000 for the first telegraph line between Washington and Baltimore. Soon afterward, Samuel Morse sent a stream of dots and dashes over that line to a friend who was waiting. His message was brief and prophetic and it read: “What hath God wrought?”
Every one of us should feel the same awe and wonderment here today.
For today, miracles in communication are our daily routine. Every minute, billions of telegraph messages chatter around the world. They interrupt law enforcement conferences and discussions of morality. Billions of signals rush over the ocean floor and fly above the clouds. Radio and television fill the air with sound. Satellites hurl messages thousands of miles in a matter of seconds.
Today our problem is not making miracles—but managing miracles. We might well ponder a different question: What hath man wrought—and how will man use his inventions?57
Bill Moyers, LBJ’s press secretary and confidant on public broadcasting matters, argued that as someone who had “become wealthy through a virtual family monopoly on media in Austin, Texas,” Johnson “knew that something was missing from American television. There was more to what the medium could be if it were not measured by ratings and the bottom line.” Presidents are often the last to know where a policy proposal is headed, but Johnson, said Moyers, knew exactly where he wanted this one to go:
We thought democracy deserved better. It was one thing for information to be commercialized, privatized, and devoted exclusively to profit. But democracy doesn’t live by bread alone; it lives on ideas, too, and occasionally it needs a full-course banquet of truth. Once television became the tool of commerce, only the price tag mattered. Contrary ideas, critical journalism, public debates, and programs that served the tastes, interests, and needs of significant but less than mass audiences were rare items in the inventory of the marketplace. In only a few years television had become, in the words of the FCC chairman “a vast wasteland,” a phrase that quickly entered the lexicon of lost opportunities.
We talked about how television could be much more of an open marketplace of ideas, available to everyone.
We talked about how instead of merely offering predigested views of current events or defining “debate” as the off-setting opinions of two politicians with vested interest in the issue, television could be more of a real battle of ideas, where one person might actually change another’s mind.
We talked about how television could be more of a storyteller, providing people with some coherent sense of the broader social forces that affect their everyday world—portraits of the world and not just snapshots.
We talked about how television could be more diverse, exposing us to the experiences and thoughts of people living on the other side of the country or the other side of the globe, including thoughts that might rattle the cage of our own settled opinions.
We talked about how television could be more independent and how it could encourage journalism that would help check the corruption and abuse of power—something that was very much on the minds of our founding fathers when they provided for the constitutional freedom of the press.
We talked about how television could be more of a mirror held up to America, revealing that we are not all white, or male, or tall, or blonde, or blue-eyed, or brave, or Protestant, or rich, or powerful.
We talked about how television could be more than the boss’ stenographer—how it would convey the interests and opinions of more people than the economic and political elites; how it could in fact help those elites understand the questions regular people asked every day—how to get a job, how to pay the doctor, how to put food on the table, how to get the kids through school, how to afford old age—the very questions corporate media scarcely valued.
All this talk led to something. It led us to believe that what democracy needed was a truly free and independent broadcasting service—free of both state and commerce. The President sat in on some of these meetings. He liked what he heard, and when he sent to Congress what became the Public Broadcasting Act of l967, it was with a ringing request that “the public interest be fully served through the public airwaves.”58
Bill Moyers well recalled how close they came. The Carnegie Commission prepared a report that LBJ used as the basis for his legislation; it coined the phrase “public television” in calling for “a broadcasting system that would be publicly funded but not government run, an important distinction to keep in mind.”59 U.S. public broadcasting was seen as providing cutting-edge political and creative programming that commercial broadcasting found un-profitable, and as serving poor and marginalized audiences of little interest to the commercial networks.60 As Pennsylvania Republican senator Hugh Scott said during the congressional debates on the matter in 1967, “I want to see things on public television that I hate—things that make me think!”61 The vision was bold: in the New York Times James Reston compared the Carnegie Report to the 1862 Morrill Act creating land-grant colleges and universities. Public broadcasting would change media, journalism, and politics just as land-grant colleges had begun “the great experiment of mass higher education in the United States.”62
To the view of the Carnegie Corporation, this would be a well-funded service, based on an excise tax on the sale of television sets eventually reaching 5 percent and placed in a trust fund where politicians would not have direct control.63 When the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 was passed, this was the one key element of the Carnegie plan that was dropped. “It was a bold idea,” recalled Moyers, “and it went nowhere.”64 Had it been fully implemented, public broadcasting would enjoy an annual budget that would be approaching the $4 billion range in 2012 dollars.65 That is almost ten times more than the present federal budget for public radio and television.
What happened to put the kibosh on the crucial funding mechanism? Unfortunately, the men who controlled the congressional purse strings did not share Johnson’s enthusiasm for “rededicating a part of the airwaves, which belong to all the people . . . for the enlightenment of all the people.” House Ways and Means Committee chairman Wilbur Mills, a wily Arkansas Democrat whose committee developed and advanced legislation dealing with taxes, was called to the White House, poked and prodded by Johnson. But Mills, who despite initial reservations had helped the president establish a funding stream for Johnson’s Medicare program, was not going along this time. “Well, that’s all well and good, Lyndon,” he told Johnson. “But you were up there long enough [in Congress] to know we ain’t gonna give money to folks without some strings attached. We don’t work that way.”66 Mills was in those days known as “the most powerful man in Washington.”67 And he refused to use that power to create an independent public broadcasting system robust enough to hold men like him to account. “That was that,” recalled Moyers. “It meant a life on the dole for this new enterprise. And it left us vulnerable.”68
Vulnerable—not just to bad television, but also to bad politics. Johnson’s and the Carnegie Commission’s vision of a dissident, edgy, and provocative broadcasting service to drive American culture and democracy to ever-greater heights was doomed from the start because the independent funding mechanism had been sabotaged. Before 1967 ended, nascent public broadcasting journalism was in the midst of controversy for programming it did on racism and for examining the dubious claims in television advertising.69 When the newly formed Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) aired muckraking programs such as Banks and the Poor, it sent some politicians into a tizzy. President Nixon vetoed the public broadcasting budget authorization in 1972 to express his displeasure.70 The Democratic platform that year, arguably the most left-wing Democratic platform since the New Deal, stated, “We should support long-range financing for public broadcasting, insulated from political pressures. We deplore the Nixon Administration’s crude efforts to starve and muzzle public broadcasting, which has become a vital supplement to commercial television.” PBS eventually did get its funding, but the message was made very clear to public broadcasters: be very careful in the coverage of political and social issues, and expect unwanted controversy if you proceed outside the political boundaries that exist in commercial broadcast journalism.
Although the Carnegie report and all the related documents surrounding the creation of public broadcasting emphasized the importance of the service to extending and deepening democratic citizenship and participation to the great mass of Americans, its importance for election campaigns was never directly stated; it was implicit. The importance became explicit with a revealing episode during the 1968 election campaign. The Carnegie Corporation gave a two-year $300,000 grant to Thomas P. F. Hoving to launch the National Citizens Committee for Public Broadcasting in 1967 to push the government to get the public system funded and operational.71 Hoving, a Princeton PhD, had served as New York City parks commissioner before becoming director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1967, his job at the time, all before turning forty.72 Hoving assembled an impressive membership, a veritable who’s who, of intellectuals including John Kenneth Galbraith, artists such as Harry Belafonte, civic leader Walter Sandbach of the Consumers Union and other leaders like him, and some business leaders and heads of nonprofit organizations. This group’s purpose was to create a “people’s lobby” that would pressure Congress to “pay off” on its “public broadcasting pledge.”73 Not only was Hoving frustrated that Congress was dragging its heels; he also thought the commercial TV networks and AT&T, which controlled the necessary wires to make a national network possible, were in no particular hurry to launch a fourth network.
In the summer of 1968, the National Citizens Committee for Public Broadcasting issued a report on the state of public broadcasting, and Hoving, a talented publicist, went on a media blitz for the next six months to push the cause of public broadcasting.74 In the midst of the 1968 election campaigns, Hoving quickly gravitated to the issues that provoked an enthusiastic response: the horrible coverage of campaigns by the commercial broadcasters, the inundation of the airwaves by political advertising, and the desperate need for a noncommercial alternative. Commercial networks are premiering “new season trivia when our times literally scream out for relevancy,” Hoving proclaimed. Candidates “are being seen primarily in paid political announcements—commercials—where they are shown to their best advantage. . . . The institution of free elections in this country is being reduced to the level of selling soap ads and dog food.”75
The networks refused to air presidential debates unless they could get a waiver to prevent third-party candidates from participating. Hoving dismissed this as “an artificial issue and a stalling tactic.” He noted that the existing public broadcasters had already announced their willingness to air presidential debates with all the candidates on the ballot participating.76 The solution was obvious: “a fourth, noncommercial network” that could go toe-to-toe with the commercial players and raise the standards for everyone.
To judge by press accounts, with his emphasis on campaign coverage, Hoving struck a powerful nerve. “Mr. Hoving has a point. The debates should be held, even at the risk of including other than major party candidates,” the Boston Globe wrote.77 “It is unrealistic to think that a fourth, noncommercial network could be set up in time for the election,” the Christian Science Monitor editorialized. “But the current lightweight electorate-information efforts of the commercial networks argue that one is needed as soon as possible.”78 The National Citizens Committee for Public Broadcasting’s campaign floundered thereafter. Hoving committed the unforgiveable political sin of “arousing the wrath . . . of the commercial broadcasting lobby,” something proponents of public broadcasting had steadfastly avoided doing at all costs.79 The blowback was intense—from the fearful noncommercial broadcasters as well as from commercial interests—and effectively ended the campaign. He soon left the group, which was reformed as a public-interest group based in Washington to push for more public-interest work by the commercial broadcasters. The brief moment for fundamental reform, for muscular independent public broadcasting, to the extent it existed, had passed.
Almost since its inception, public broadcasting has been in the crosshairs of Dollarocracy. Conservatives in Congress use what little money it does provide as leverage to continually badger public broadcasters to stay within the same ideological range found on the commercial networks.80 Conservatives are obsessed with public broadcasting because the traditional sources of control in commercial media—owners and advertisers—are not in place, and that means there is a greater possibility that the public system might produce critical work.
Milton Friedman wanted public broadcasting to be subject to “market discipline,” while Rush Limbaugh characterized PBS as “an elitist group of politically correct millionaires.”81 In 1995, following the Republican takeover of Congress in the 1994 elections, Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich announced his plan to “zero out” federal support for public broadcasting. In 2012, Mitt Romney returned to this idea in the first presidential debate. Over the years, Democrats have proved timid in their defenses of the institution, and after LBJ none of their leaders ever expended political capital to elevate it from its marginal status, especially on the television side. At best, Democrats defended the status quo.
Ironically, while the conservative attacks on public media have created a rallying cry among the loud, hellfire elements of the right, they have never been embraced by the general population. Many conservatives actually like public broadcasting. And conservatives who value supporting a quality political culture over gaming the system to increase the odds of victory regardless of the consequences want no part of this battle. In 1984, no less a conservative icon than Barry Goldwater decried cutting any government funding to public broadcasting. Goldwater argued that the rise of commercialism on public broadcasting “marks the end of the only decent source of broadcasting in this country.”82 The Republicans dropped their plan to zero out public broadcasting in the 1990s when Congress was flooded with public opposition, much of it from conservatives who, presumably, enjoyed watching Bill Buckley chat with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher on the PBS program Firing Line.83
Without muscular public broadcasting serving the public interest, without commitments to replace advertising that sold candidates like toothpaste—as Adlai Stevenson had complained—without free airtime, and without the real campaign-finance reforms that would guard against the buying of elections, America met the high wave of the electronic age without adequate breakwaters against abuse. The extent of the abuse would become increasingly evident as television evolved from its initial role as a campaign tool to become the defining force in American politics.
In the 1970s and 1980s, there was continual grousing about political advertising and its perceived deleterious effects on the electoral process. There were also a number of reform efforts, though none led to anything that would change the system in any substantive sense. By the mid-1990s, however, the connection between money and politics was widely recognized as a very serious issue and as a threat to credible elections and governance. Warren Beatty’s acclaimed 1998 political satire Bulworth addressed squarely the very issues that drive this book. Foundations devoted many millions of dollars to create organizations that would rally support for campaign-finance reform at the state and national levels. There was a concerted effort by top Democrats and Republicans—among them Senators Russ Feingold and John McCain—to require commercial broadcasters to provide free time to candidates so as to deemphasize the role of Big Money in corrupting the election system. This effort had widespread popular support. Yet it got so little attention that media analyst Howard Kurtz would note in an interview with McCain, “Now the major networks as best as I can determine have devoted zero airtime to this provision of yours.”84
Kurtz and McCain established where the challenge lay:
KURTZ: In pushing this bill for free airtime, you are taking on the National Association of Broadcasters. Let me ask you a serious political question. What are you, nuts?
MCCAIN: They are the most powerful lobby in Washington.
KURTZ: Why is that?
MCCAIN: I think one of the reasons is, is because they can say we’d like for you to meet with the general managers of every television station in your state. You go into a room, hear the people that carry your message, and they never—they’re very sophisticated. They’re not saying do what we want done. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that kind of a scenario, but it’s very clear that these are the people that shape the opinion to a large degree of the people who are your constituents.
KURTZ: It’s going to be awfully hard to beat in both Houses of Congress . . .
MCCAIN: Yes.85
Free airtime for candidates was a reasonable and modest demand; the commercial broadcasters received their monopoly licenses and rights to the scarce air channels at no charge in return for serving the public interest. The pertinent law assumes that these are firms that must go beyond just maximizing their own profits to justify their getting these lucrative monopoly licenses over other prospective licensees. Those broadcasters that refused to make concessions to the public interest would see their monopoly licenses turned over to a different firm when the term expired. (That this was the case in the letter and spirit of the law, but not in the application of the law, attests to the power of the commercial broadcasting lobby over the years.)86
In legislation and rulings, both Congress and the Supreme Court explicitly stated that providing campaign coverage was a definitional component of the public-service requirements for a broadcaster. The FCC even has a formal expectation that local broadcasters would cover state and local races, and until 1991 candidates in such races had an affirmative right of access to the extent the race could be considered significant.87 As political advertising and the costs of campaigns mushroomed in the 1980s and 1990s, the amount and quality of commercial television’s campaign coverage seemed woefully inadequate, and, on the whole, television’s contribution to electoral democracy was regarded by more than a few Americans as increasingly destructive.
By 1997, the matter reached its apogee as a viable public issue. President Bill Clinton came out publicly for free airtime with the formation of the Gore Commission. This was a body recommended by the FCC and appointed by the White House in 1997 to determine the public-service obligations of commercial broadcasters in exchange for their having received lucrative digital broadcasting spectrum for free—valued by some as worth $70 billion—in the 1996 Telecommunications Act. The president noted upon forming the Gore Commission that, although the move from analog to digital signals would give broadcasters “much more signal capacity than they have today,” broadcasters had “asked Congress to be given this new access to the public airwaves without charge”—an end result the president found inadequate. “I believe, therefore, it is time to update broadcasters’ public interest obligations to meet the demands of the new times and the new technological realities. I believe broadcasters who receive digital licenses should provide free air time for candidates, and I believe the FCC should act to require free airtime for candidates.”88
The FCC chair at the time, William Kennard, was an ardent supporter of free airtime. No radical—he followed the FCC pattern and went on to a lucrative career as a wheeler-dealer in the telecommunication industry following his tenure—Kennard hoped that the Gore Commission would adhere to the president’s wishes. But with several commercial broadcasters among its members, the Gore Commission proved next to worthless.
“At the end of the day,” Kennard said, “the broadcast industry was fundamentally unwilling to accept any requirements that they broadcast more public interest programming.”89 “When President Clinton asked that broadcasters set aside free television time for candidates,” columnist Jeff Cohen wrote at the time, the “NAB reacted with the indignation one might expect from the National Rifle Association if the president had proposed banning not only assault weapons, but hunting rifles, handguns and toy guns.”90 Kennard understood the core problem. “The Gore Commission report came after the spectrum had been given away. And so the leverage was lost.”91
Clinton would eventually let the matter drop, but Kennard persisted in his efforts to secure free airtime for political candidates. He knew from getting out on the road that the idea was popular everywhere, across the political spectrum. “I’d go out to talk to groups, grassroots groups, and I’d say, ‘Well, what about breaking some of this dependency of politicians on money by requiring broadcasters to give away some of their time for free?’ and people would say ‘Yeah, that’s a great idea,’ and we’d talk about how to do it.” He quickly learned that popular sentiment notwithstanding, the range of discussion was far narrower in Washington. “You say the same thing at a cocktail party in Washington and people would look at you like you were crazy.”92
Congress was certainly not listening to Kennard, or the people, on this one. In fact, when Kennard broached the idea of free airtime for candidates, key members of Congress made it clear that Kennard should drop the matter or risk seeing the FCC’s budget cut severely. “The job has been made much harder because of the influence of money in politics.” Kennard explained what happened behind the scenes:
When I first started talking to people about free airtime for political candidates, some of my oldest and closest friends in Washington took me to breakfast, and they said, “Bill, don’t do this; it’s political suicide, you know. You’re just going to kill yourself.” And, you know, they were right. I thought it was so sad that we have so distorted the concept of what it means to be a public trustee that you can’t even talk about these issues as an independent regulator without people castigating you. It’s really sort of outrageous.93
No regulator or politician close to the levers of power has dared to expend political capital advancing Kennard’s cause subsequently. The issue has all but evaporated since 2000, even among staunch progressives on the FCC such as Michael Copps. The various campaign-finance groups either folded their tents or reconciled themselves to the distant margins of polite society. The U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision of 2010 seemed to lock in unlimited political spending and TV commercialism for all time, or until a constitutional amendment could be passed.
Nonetheless, there were two revealing incidents in 2012. By law, commercial broadcasters have to keep records of political ad buys, including their cost, and show them to anyone who asks. With the massive growth of super-PACs and overall political advertising spending, many people had a newfound interest in seeing who was paying for all the political ads on their local stations. Traditionally, that has meant that citizens had to trek to a local TV station’s office and stay there to peruse the files. “The notion of someone walking in and looking at pieces of paper—in the 21st century—it’s ridiculous on its face,” public interest advocate Meredith McGehee said.94 The majority opinion in the Citizens United decision had stated that transparency on the Internet was essential if the unlimited campaign spending it countenanced was not to be damaging to the electoral process.
FCC chairman Julius Genachowski, a Democrat, supported regulation requiring stations to post the material online so that citizens could more readily access it. But the broadcasters responded negatively, in part for fear that increased publicity might dampen the enthusiasm of some political advertisers to purchase spots. It “would ultimately lead to a Soviet-style standardization of the way advertising should be sold,” one executive stated. They also claimed the cost of transferring the material to digital form was onerous and could lead to annual expenses of between $120,000 and $140,000 per station.95
The FCC voted on party lines for an Internet political advertising database in April. Beginning August 2, television stations affiliated with the top four networks (ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC) in the nation’s top fifty television markets were required to upload new political ad purchases to a public database. But as a Sunlight Foundation report noted, that left out “some 160 television markets, some of which are in battleground states.” Sunlight’s research concluded, “In four of the nine states considered key in this year’s general election—Colorado, Florida, Virginia, Ohio, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Virginia and Wisconsin—less than half of presidential ads would be disclosed on the FCC database.”96
The NAB attempted unsuccessfully in the U.S. Court of Appeals to stay the rule in July and then announced it was proceeding to court to have the rule formally overturned.97 The matter is to be taken up in 2013 if the NAB proceeds with the case. To the extent the matter received any digital or print news media attention, the commercial broadcasters were flame-broiled, not that it had any effect. “The hypocrisy of the media conglomerates, which (occasionally) insist on transparency in government but resist it themselves,” Dan Gillmor wrote for Britain’s The Guardian, “is unsurprising.”98
The second incident concerned the massive influx of political advertising placed by third-party groups unaffiliated with candidates’ campaigns. This posed a new dilemma for broadcasters. With regard to candidate ads, broadcasters could not check them for factual accuracy; they were protected political speech that had to run as they were. The news divisions of the stations could then criticize the content of the advertising if they found the material misleading or fraudulent. Not so with third-party political ads. Similar to commercial advertisements, broadcasters could reject them or require them to provide evidence that they were accurate. And it wasn’t really an “option.”
According to a 1971 ruling, the FCC should assure that stations must take “reasonable steps” to satisfy themselves “as to the reliability and reputation of every prospective advertiser.” If stations fail to comply, a 1978 court ruling determined, it might be grounds for a broadcaster losing its broadcast license. Viewers have a right to view ads on publicly owned airwaves that broadcasters believe are accurate and not deceptive. “The FCC has a long history of expecting stations, as part of their overall obligation to operate in the public interest, to avoid knowingly airing false claims in commercial advertising,” broadcast industry attorney Michael Berg wrote in TVNewsCheck.99
In part because much of the funding for these ads was anonymous, the third-party spots tended to be blatantly bogus. “The level of inaccuracy in the third-party presidential ads has been high,” scholar Kathleen Hall Jamieson observed during the course of the campaign. One study showed that 57 percent of the money spent by the four biggest-spending third-party groups in Iowa was for ads containing misleading claims, the likes of which fast-food and automobile advertisers would have a hard time getting away with.100 The Annenberg Public Policy Center determined that 85 percent of the money spent on ads by the four biggest-spending third-party groups between December 2011 and June 2012 contained deceptive information.101
Nevertheless, the commercial broadcasters punted when they were approached on the matter. FactCheck.org found not a single case of TV stations rejecting a third-party political ad or requiring third-party groups to verify the claims they were making in their ads.102 As the head of the Iowa Broadcast News Association concluded, “The test for accepting an ad is whether the check that pays for it is good.”103 The FCC punted, too, apparently not wanting to tangle with the broadcast lobby. “They’re not going to touch that until after the elections, if then,” one activist on the issue informed us in the summer of 2012. FCC chairman Julius “Genachowski is afraid of his own shadow right now, especially when it comes to appearing to be too political in an election season.”104
With only minor exceptions, the general sense emanating from the 2012 experience was that, while just about everyone else thought the entire system was breaking down, commercial broadcasters were cashing in. And the responsible regulators were watching from the sidelines. The Federal Election Commission was so ineffectual that there was virtually no significant penalty for breaking the rules. “The Federal Election Commission is a national scandal,” said Fred Wertheimer, president of the campaign-finance reform group Democracy 21. “We have no enforcement of the campaign-finance laws.”105 “The enforcement system is so weak, nonfunctional,” political advertising scholar Michael Franz put it, “that pretty much anybody can do whatever they want.”106
As we discuss in Chapter 2, the term used in much of the commentary was that it was a “wild west” environment. “We’re no longer arguing what standards we should apply to political advertising,” Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson said. “We’re starting to argue whether there are any standards whatsoever for political advertising.”107 Rolling Stone’s political correspondent Tim Dickinson concluded his examination of TV political advertising by noting, “The dirtier the system, the better for the bottom line at TV stations.”108 With the immediate stakes of winning an election, or making big bucks as a commercial broadcaster, hanging in the balance, the rational course is to shoot first and let the lawyers and lobbyists worry about any legal niceties later.
The corruption goes far beyond the flexing of lobbying muscle. Perhaps coincidentally, precisely as political advertising began to mushroom for commercial broadcasters, they began to lessen or even discontinue the manners in which they had covered political campaigns previously. The average number of free messages fifteen minutes or longer that broadcasters gave to presidential candidates, for example, fell from sixty in 1952 to twenty in 1972 to five in 1988 and, as far as we can tell, to zero thereafter.109 Party convention coverage has shrunk; what were from the 1950s to the 1970s major civics lessons for Americans have become vacuous, scripted events. Candidate debates are rarely shown on commercial television, and commercial stations increasingly do not carry any debates except for three presidential and one vice presidential debates.110
Consider the 2010 U.S. Senate race in Wisconsin. Incumbent Russ Feingold offered to debate his millionaire opponent in forums across the state. It sounded like a great opportunity for Republican Ron Johnson, who had never sought or held public office and had little record in public life. Johnson could have had equal footing with the three-term senator he was trying to unseat—an opening that challengers historically have sought. But Johnson, who scrupulously avoided interviews with newspaper editorial boards that might have given a sense of where he stood, refused the debate offer.
Instead, he let his advertisements and those paid for by the Chamber of Commerce, American Action Network, and sundry organizations that flooded the state with anti-Feingold ads do his talking. Even when Johnson did participate in the three traditional candidate debates available for broadcast by the state’s TV stations, some stations avoided airing them in prime time. These same stations were broadcasting Johnson ads around the clock, including the period when the debate was taking place. Wisconsin lawyer Ed Garvey, a former Democratic nominee for governor, tried to tune in to a much-anticipated Feingold-Johnson debate, only to find it was not being aired. He called the station and was told he could track it down on a Web site. “As a citizen, I was left with no option but the ads. I got nothing of substance from television stations,” griped Garvey. “I thought they were supposed to operate in the public interest.”111
Most ominously, the amount of news coverage of political campaigns on commercial television, never much to write home about, has fallen precipitously over the past three decades.112 Thomas Patterson noted that the amount of network TV news coverage of campaigns plummeted from 1992 to 2000 alone.113 By the new century, the average commercial television station had long been providing far more political advertising during a political campaign than it did news coverage of the campaign.
In a hotly contested U.S. Senate primary race in New Jersey in 2000, $21 million was spent on TV ads, but the stations receiving the ads averaged only thirteen seconds per day in news time on the race.114 One study showed that in states with competitive Senate races in 2004, four times as many hours were given to ads for the race as were given to news coverage of the race. Another study of the 2006 election found a similar pattern.115 “Local television news in most communities is unashamedly show business, not journalism,” communication scholar Michael Schudson wrote in 1995, “and devotes only the slightest amount of airtime to local electoral candidates and issues.”116
A study of eleven local media markets in 2004 determined that only 8 percent of the 4,333 news broadcasts in the month preceding the election had even mentioned a single local race. The same newscasts had eight times as many stories about accidental injuries as they did local races during this month.117
Indeed, the pathetic and appalling state of broadcast campaign coverage no longer requires academic research to be established; it is on a par with stating that people no longer tend to use the telegraph to communicate. One acquaintance we know who was running for governor of a Midwest state as a Democrat in a general election complained to a TV station manager that his campaign was not getting any news coverage. “You want to get on the air?” the broadcaster replied. “Buy an ad.” Whether intentional or not, commercial broadcasters have little incentive to give away for free what has become a major source of profit for them.
In 2010, the Pew Research Center reported that broadcast news remained the most important source of news for Americans, with 78 percent of Americans turning to local TV on a typical day.118 If there is a public-service component in commercial broadcasting, this is likely where it is to be found. How well are the broadcasters converting their revenues from political ads into quality campaign journalism?
By 2012, the ongoing tragedy was now a farce. The amount of resources going to broadcast journalism fell sharply in recent years. A Columbia Journalism Review study of a “hard-fought congressional primary near Scranton, PA, found that six local stations aired some 28 hours of political ads, and only a half-dozen news reports, over nearly eight weeks.”119 And it is not just the quantity, but the quality as well. Much of what little local TV broadcast news campaign coverage remains is superficial, focusing on polls, predications, and spin. Actual hard reporting is increasingly rare.
Some of TV coverage of campaigns actually uses political ads as the basis of news stories. “Releasing a single ad often drives millions of dollars in publicity,” Wilner wrote. “A provocative ad can accomplish its mission without a single dollar behind it. Compare that with product marketing, where there’s no free lunch.”120 Vanderbilt political scientist John Geer noted, “Ads now are not just aimed at voters. They are aimed at journalists.”121 TV news embraces this role, publicizing TV ads, especially negative ones, and assessing how much political impact the ads are having as the basis of the shows’ political journalism.
Whole cable programs are devoted to “deep, searching” discussions of particular ads; television loves the visual and the chance to “cover” campaigns without ever leaving the studio. This is an ideal way for corporate broadcasters to cover politics: it is cheap and easy to do, takes no particular skill or intelligence, reaffirms that the Commercial is King, and reminds candidates that the path to news coverage goes through the ad sales department. Each of the examples of negative presidential ads in Chapter 4—from the Daisy ad and Willie Horton to Swift Boats—gained far more attention from the TV news coverage of the ads than the ads themselves generated. It is now part of the strategy in the money-and-media election complex to use ads strategically to drive or shift news coverage.
So where has local TV news been in covering some of the great political stories of our times, the ones that directly involve them? How has TV news fared in examining the massive influx of cash into the election process, as well as the veracity of the TV political ads broadcast? As the Columbia Journalism Review noted, local TV stations have an “obligation, given the ad saturation . . . to stay on top of this spending spree.” They must also cover “when and how the ads mislead.”122
Research during the 2012 campaigns provided comprehensive answers to these questions, and, to be sure, they took no one who ever watched television by surprise. The media reform group Free Press conducted comprehensive examinations in several swing states of how local TV news covered the role of outside third-party money in the states’ political campaigns. These were all stations flooded with political spots from such groups, much to the dismay of their viewers. In Milwaukee, for example, there were no stories on any of the seventeen groups buying massive amounts of airtime before the recall election of Governor Scott Walker. But in the same two-week period, local news programs aired fifty-three stories on Justin Bieber. In Cleveland, the four network affiliates did no stories on the Koch-brothers–funded Americans for Prosperity, although that group placed five hundred anti-Obama attack ads on the same stations. In Charlotte, between January and August 2012, the three top-spending third-party groups spent $4 million for their ads at the network-affiliated stations. Those stations did zero stories on these three groups.123
Another Free Press study, this time in Denver, compared the amount of coverage local news shows gave to the five biggest-spending third-party groups with the amount of time those groups’ ads ran on the same stations. The conclusion: for every 1 minute Denver TV news reported on these outside groups and their ads, the same stations ran 162 minutes of ads from these groups.124 “In other words,” journalist Edward Wasserman wrote, “the funders of political advertising appear to have purchased not just air time, but immunity from media scrutiny.”125 As the Sunlight Foundation’s Bill Allison noted, local TV news has a “huge conflict of interest” when it comes to examining these subjects. “Broadcasters have an incentive not to see the system changed.”126
Deep into the campaign, the Pew Research Center determined that only one in four Americans had heard “a lot” about outside third parties involved in the 2012 election, and that the balance of Americans had heard little or nothing on the subject. (A mere 2 percent of Americans thought the outside money had a positive effect on the election process.)127
Even if third-party money was a new development in American politics by 2012, the notion of TV news (or news media more broadly) fact-checking ads has a longer pedigree. By the early 1990s, leading scholars like Jamieson argued elegantly that the news media could do a decent job policing TV political advertising to prevent candidates from misleading voters. Jamieson acknowledged that was a tall order in view of the pervasiveness and persuasiveness of the spots.128 But, Jamieson argued, “fact-checking matters. The act of fact-checking does tend to improve accuracy in political ads and it helps voters learn.”129
In the past decade, the bottom dropped out of that cup. To some extent, it was due to the shrinkage of traditional print media newsrooms. It was also due to the explosion in the number of ads, which were far beyond what even a large reporting crew could monitor effectively. “With a literal flood of advertising expenditures in contested battleground states,” Darrell West wrote in 2010, “the ability of journalists to oversee candidate and group claims plummeted. . . . Journalists have relinquished that traditional role and left candidates to police themselves.”130
As the 2012 campaign came to a close, Jamieson was reduced to pleading with television and radio outlets that “benefited from unprecedented levels of political ad spending this year to “increase their scrutiny of every non-candidate ad they are offered, rejecting those containing deceptions and protecting the public by using the power of their newsrooms to inform, contextualize, and debunk.”131
Local TV news, conflicted as it is, gave an especially deplorable performance in fact-checking ads in 2012. In the examination of Denver, Free Press determined that there was more TV news fact-checking of political ads there than in any of the other communities it examined. The Fox affiliate, for example, ran a “Fact or Fiction” segment once or twice per week on the local news in the summer and fall anchored by veteran reporter Eli Stokols. But Stokols had no illusions about this periodic examination of political ads. “While campaigns are quick to cite such fact-checking spots in their effort to discredit opposition advertising,” he wrote,
the campaigns we call out for blatant falsehoods don’t seem to care at all. And why should they? In a campaign that could see close to $1 billion in campaign spending, it’s inevitable that any TV ad, however false or misleading, will air hundreds of times, overwhelming any news outlet’s fact-check that might air a couple of times. . . . The fact-check itself becomes part of a countering ad, just more noise in a never-ending echo chamber of allegations and attacks.132
At every one of the Denver stations that did do fact-checking in their news of the ads, Free Press found that the stations nonetheless “kept airing ads that their reporters found were false or misleading.” Free Press concluded that the “sheer amount of advertising has drowned out the few attempts to evaluate the ads’ veracity.”133
The same thing happened at WTSP in Tampa, where the station’s reporters teamed up with PolitiFact to assess the credibility of TV political ads airing in the community. They gave an attack ad from Americans for Prosperity their lowest “Pants on Fire” rating. They did so, PolitiFact’s Angie Holan said, “because it’s so misleading, and it’s ridiculously false.” Nonetheless, WTSP aired the spot 150 times in the month following the report. “If the station’s own news team says it is false, and they keep running it, you have to question the station’s commitment to the audience,” Free Press policy director Matt Wood said.134
Indeed.
It is difficult to review the commercial broadcasters’ performance and not react like Dan Gillmor, who said one of the “great scandals” is how “television is complicit in this thoroughly corrupt system.”135 Or Bill Moyers and Bernard Weisberger, who asked, “When was the last time you heard one of the millionaire anchors of the Sunday morning talk shows aggressively pursue a beltway poohbah demanding to learn about the perfidious sources of secret money that is poisoning our politics?”136
Americans now take their predicament for granted, and many wade though the sludge of election campaigns in a state of despondence and depression, if they are paying any attention at all. How refreshing to hear words like these of Marty Kaplan: “Imagine what democracy would be like if elections were more than cash cows for local TV stations selling ads, if they were more than profit centers for conglomerates whose business model is monetizing the attention of—that is, entertaining—audiences. Imagine if campaigns really were what we deserved: great national conversations about issues and choices.”137
Just imagine.
THE DISCUSSION IN this chapter leads to several questions: First, why does television get the preponderance of political advertising in an era when people are spending more and more time online? Put another way, has the system of television political advertising already reached its peak, and is it facing an inevitable decline? In 2012, the answer was clear: “Online is how you preach to the converted,” Goldstein explained. “TV is how you reach the undecided, the passive viewers of politics.”138 “When it comes to political advertising,” AdWeek wrote, “digital is still just a sideshow.”139 As Eli Pariser put it with regard to the Internet, “The state of the art in political advertising is half a decade behind the state of the art in commercial advertising.”140 Goldstein said one of digital’s main functions at present is for “fundraising so that a lot of money can be spent on TV.”141
At some point, however, the audience for television almost certainly will decline sufficiently that the money will begin to flow in different directions. By Election Day, more than a few politicos were wondering if “voters [might] become so tired of the messages, most of them negative, that they begin to tune them out.”142 The transition from television to digital appears inevitable; it is only a matter of time. Whether this will lead to a weakening of the money-and-media election complex or, as with commercial advertising, the money will simply flood whatever new arena emerges, possibly in a more insidious manner, is another matter altogether. In Chapter 8 we assess the extent to which the Internet has altered the system to date and what the indications are for it to do so in the visible future.
Second, nearly every scholarly treatment of political advertising and commercial broadcasting acknowledges the defects we highlight in this chapter and in Chapter 4. Indeed, we draw much of our critique from this research—and from the very public crack-up that was the 2012 campaign. Some of these scholars, however, are sanguine about political advertising’s role in American democracy. Their defense of political advertising invariably assumes there will be a credible political journalism—a viable Fourth Estate if you will—that will provide an effective counterbalance to political advertising, if not provide the preponderance of political information to the citizenry. After all, research repeatedly confirms that political ads “are most effective with less-engaged voters.”143 If the United States has a high-quality political journalism, the ability of bogus and destructive TV spots to dominate campaign discourse will be sharply reduced, if not eliminated.
But television journalism has all but abandoned its duty to provide fact-checking and thorough reporting as a corrective to political advertising. This puts increased pressure on the balance of the news media to do yeoman’s work to protect the integrity and vitality of the political culture. Are the news media doing their job satisfactorily? To the extent they are not, where does that leave matters?
These are the questions we turn to in Chapters 6 and 7. We will not keep you in suspense: the news is not good.