mediacrit.com

OK, it’s time for all of us to admit it. The entire election process is broken and needs major repairs. The two major parties won’t say it, since they like a system that they can manipulate. And the broadcast media won’t say it, since they profit enormously from the whole thing.

But it should be increasingly apparent to all American citizens that we’re not well served by an election process that is fueled by money and results in legislative sessions that amount to little more than a series of post-election favors to big contributors.

From a democratic perspective, the relationship of our mass media system to politics is highly dysfunctional. Politicians in Washington, D.C. regularly accept millions of dollars in contributions from large media conglomerates and their lobbying groups in order to finance their campaigns to stay in power. Those same media conglomerates use their money to influence deregulation that enables them to grow larger and be subjected to fewer civic rules. This insiders political game has fueled the growth of media conglomerates like Time Warner, Viacom, the News Corporation, Clear Channel, Disney, and General Electric/NBC over the past decade.

Once they have their hands on the millions in contributions, politicians then turn to the local television stations of many of the same media conglomerates and spend record amounts each election cycle to get their political ads on the air. In 1982, campaigns spent $210 million on television political advertising. In 1994 that figure had grown to $410 million.

But in recent years, political advertising has become an even bigger business for the local television stations in the nation’s 210 TV markets. By 2000, politicians had become the third-best advertising client for network-affiliated local TV stations, just behind automobiles and retail stores. In 2002, political ad revenue for TV stations amounted to $1 billion, and this year local television stations are projected to reap at least $1.6 billion.

Although broadcasters have been happy to take political ad money, they have been poor public citizens: in a study conducted by the Lear Center Local News Archive of the weeks leading up to Election Day 2002, more than 80 percent of local top-rated TV news broadcasts contained at least one political ad, but only 44 percent of the broadcasts contained any campaign coverage at all. In those reports that did have campaign coverage, they were most likely to be about campaign strategy, not issues.

If you are a viewer of local TV news these days, you might notice a repeat of these findings in the 2004 campaign: lots of political ads, not much of substance about the campaigns.

There are some good ideas on how to improve things. One thoughtful proposal, from the nonpartisan Alliance for Better Campaigns, is called the “Our Democracy, Our Airwaves Act.” The Act would require broadcasters, who make a lot of money operating on our public airwaves, to air a minimum of two hours per week of candidate-centered and issue centered reports in the six weeks leading up to primary and general elections.

Two hours a week of substantial political reporting sounds rather modest, but would be a huge improvement to what happened in 2002, when 56 percent of the nation’s top-rated local news broadcasts did not contain a single story in the seven weeks leading up to the election.

The Alliance for Better Campaigns proposal also calls for assessing commercial TV and radio stations with an annual fee for using the public broadcast spectrum to fund a voucher program that would pay for the political ads of national candidates and their parties. Candidates would become eligible for vouchers by raising small-dollar contributions to earn broadcast ad time.

The point is not to stop political advertising (something that the First Amendment would never permit) but to publicly fund hundreds of millions of dollars of what is spent on ads. This would in turn reign in the constant fundraising that makes House, Senate, and presidential candidates servants of big corporations and not the people.

You can bet the powerful National Association of Broadcasters lobby will be quick to shoot down any kind of media-campaign reform that might infringe on the profits of local station owners. So, the only way we can change the system is to use our own political action, and—ultimately—to vote to make this whole process of voting better.

There are other ways beyond media reform to make the election process more palatable. I’ll discuss those in my next column.