Faculty, experts debate effects of television on politics at Ekstrom

By Eugene Vilensky

Faculty, experts debate effects of television on politics at Ekstrom

The Ekstrom Library hosted a forum last Monday, October 28, that debated some of the hottest issues facing politics today: free airtime for political candidates and the effect television advertising has had on democracy in America.

At issue is the “public interest” obligation of the broadcasters. “ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox don’t own the airwaves they use; we do,” states a brochure put out by the Alliance for Better Campaigns. The chief law governing broadcasters, the Communications Act of 1934, set meager license fees for broadcasters in exchange for their commitment to “serve the public interest.” This commitment has arguably been subverted by the massive amounts of money being spent on commercial political advertising, increasing from less than $200 million in 1971 to more than $1 billion in 2000.

Introducing the forum was Richard Beliles, the state chairman of Common Cause, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization sponsoring the forum. “We work for open government, to reduce the influence of money in government,” said Beliles. Common Cause has no paid staff in Kentucky.

Beliles also introduced the star of the panel, Paul Taylor, the founder of the Alliance for Better Campaigns, an umbrella organization which includes Common Cause. Taylor was a political correspondent for 25 years, has written several books, and taught at Princeton University.

The other panelists were U of L’s “most popular professor,” Phil Laemmle, former WKCP Channel 15 president John-Robert Curtin, and WAVE 3 News Director Chris Jadick.

Bob Schulman, a veteran Kentucky journalist, moderated the forum. “The one thing all parties agree on, regardless of how we feel about a particular candidate, is the odious situation inflicted on us by paid commercial advertising,” he said.

Chris Jadick began the discussion with his take on the broadcaster’s role. “There is no doubt that we make money because of political ads,” said Jadick.

WAVE 3 was praised at the forum for broadcasting the Conway/Northup debate and the debates of southern Indiana, “even though that only comprises about 20% of our audience,” said Jadick. Jadick pointed out that it is often the fault of the politician when a debate doesn’t happen. “Politicians take to the airwaves when it serves them, and when it doesn’t, they may decline.”

Laemmle, who said he didn’t watch much television, criticized much of broadcasting for its horse-race style coverage. “But no matter how exemplary the coverage WAVE or the other stations provide, it’s voluntary, and there’s no guarantee.”

Laemmle said that accepting both paid commercial time and providing free airtime could create a conflict for the stations. When asked to summarize, Laemmle said, “I think it [the proposal] is a good idea, but I think the real problem is what McCain- Feingold tried to fix, what the people are generally against: this equation of money with speech.”

Paul Taylor was asked for his views as brought up by Jadick and Laemmle, mainly concerning the reliability of both national and local networks in providing ample coverage. “There has been a sharp downward trend in terms of how much time they devote to coverage of issues of substance,” said Taylor.

“In the late 90s, our organization was very much about promoting voluntary change,” said Taylor. A panel of broadcasters chaired by Vice President Al Gore came up with the proposal to devote five minutes every night to candidates talking about issues. “Our strategy was ask for so little that they would have difficulty not meeting it,” Taylor said. A university study later showed that the typical broadcast station devoted only 45 seconds every night to such a format.

Taylor conceded that there is the occasion where a powerful incumbent refuses to debate a challenger who stands to gain, but the far more common situation is that “there are debates, but we just don’t see them on television.”

Taylor said that out of a sample of ten different states, 152 debates were counted, but only one in five were broadcast by a local station. “I would argue that the loser is the public, who are not getting the information they need,” he said.

John-Robert Curtin, who spent much of his career in public television, thought the issue ran much deeper than what the proposed legislation wanted to address.

“How do we deal with a country that’s on permanent attention deficit disorder?” asked Curtin. According to Curtin, the public’s lack of caring for the issues is a much bigger problem than simply forcing broadcasters to provide free airtime.

Donna Mancini, the Libertarian candidate for metro mayor, stood up when questions were asked from the audience. Mancini made the case for the Libertarian position on this issue.

Even though a smaller party like the Libertarians would stand to benefit, Mancini said the government should not force broadcasters to put candidates on even ground. “The free market will take care of it,” Mancini said.

Laemmle later eviscerated her argument. “It’s not a free market,” said Laemmle. “They get to use that [broadcast spectrum] for free. Had they bought that [the airwaves], like a wireless company, and we said that you have to give a certain amount of free minutes every month, this logic wouldn’t apply. The market analogy simply doesn’t apply.”

Taylor elaborated, saying that the technology as envisioned in the 1930s was to provide an important public interest claim. “If a storm is coming, we can count on the local station to tell people that,” he said. “The argument here is that we ought to take elections as one of the fundamentally import things we do in a democracy–it comes at regular, predictable times every year–and yet we have a system that feeds the right to speak to the highest bidder.”

Taylor called free airtime the “first cousin” of campaign finance reform, and all panelists seemed to agree that this was the case. Jadick said, “Big money is still going to sway, if it can’t go to broadcasters it will go to print ads, to billboards.”

As the discussion swayed towards campaign finance reform, a member of the audience stood up and said he worked on Sen. McConnell’s reelection campaign. “Limiting the amount of campaign contributions you can receive limits free speech,” he said. Then he sat down.

Taylor replied that this issue was not chiefly about campaign finance reform, but simply a method to reduce the costs of communicating over publicly owned airwaves. McConnell has been one of the Senate’s most outspoken opponents of campaign finance reform.