Campaign Finance Reform v. The National Enquirer
Who is in the tank for whom? And how would we know?
A lot of people, especially progressives, spend a lot of time being furious about how Citizens United and the super PACs that came out of that decision are corrupting American politics. A complete waste of perfectly good righteous indignation, as it turns out.
Because, as the first witness in Donald Trump’s New York criminal trial – David Pecker, former CEO of American Media, the parent company of The National Enquirer – made clear, we’ve got much bigger problems that should give everybody pause no matter what their politics.
It’s been obvious for a while that the “media exception” was beginning to consume the campaign finance rule. The media exception is a carve-out to normal campaign finance laws that allow media companies to run whatever stories they like about political candidates without those stories being deemed an “expenditure.” That also allows these media companies to run these stories in coordination with a candidate without violating any campaign finance laws.
That’s why FOX News and media personalities like Sean Hannity are allowed to carry so much water for Donald Trump so blatantly. I’m sure if you added up the value of the positive press Trump has earned from FOX alone since 2016, it would be valued in the billions.
But at least FOX is being upfront about it. As Pecker’s testimony makes clear, there was also secret water-carrying going on. At Trump’s behest, the National Enquirer, not only killed negative stories about Trump, it ran positive stories about Trump and negative stories about his opponents.
I have to ask if this is just the tip of the iceberg. How many other secret “understandings” are there out there? It’s hard to believe that this kind of thing is limited to Donald Trump or conservatives. How many other media organizations are in the tank for someone while pretending editorial independence? Trump’s deal with Pecker was particularly explicit and organized but it raises the specter of equally-insidious though less-formal arrangements with editors, media personalities, and media company CEOs. I have no evidence that these kinds of deals exist on both the left and the right but it certainly wouldn’t surprise me. And how would we ever know?
There isn’t an easy fix for this, at least not if you want to keep the First Amendment intact, but the first step on the road to recovery is recognizing you have a problem. It’s now pretty clear that obsessing about corporate campaign contributions – from every sort of company except for media companies – is ridiculous and even dangerous. At the very least, this practice needs to be brought out of the shadows.