Campaign Finance Reform


July 14, 2001


BROOKE GLADSTONE: From WNYC in New York this is NPR'S On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. This week broadcasters were out in force on Capitol Hill lobbying against a law that would require stations to offer politicians lower prices for campaign ads. The provision was passed by the Senate in March as part of the controversial McCain-Feingold legislation, but when the campaign finance bill was stalled in the House of Representatives on a procedural vote this past week, the ad pricing measure attached to the bill was stalled with it. Paul Taylor is the executive director of the Alliance for Better Campaigns, the election reform advocacy group leading the charge to get the provision passed. Paul Taylor, welcome back to On the Media.

PAUL TAYLOR: Good to be here.

BOB GARFIELD: Well let's lay out the situation. As the existing law stands, broadcasters may charge candidates only the lowest rate that any advertiser commands for political advertising, except--?

PAUL TAYLOR: Except what's happened in the last decade or so is that the incredible torrent of money that's rushed into the political system, the so-called soft money that this bill is supposed to outlaw, has created a classic demand spike, and we tracked this last fall. We looked at ten stations around the country. Brigham Young University looked at stations in 17 different cities around the country and we both found the same phenomena. The Brigham Young study found that from the end of July through the end of October, the heart of the campaign season, political ad rates on local television stations tripled --tripled! Now candidates got a slight discount off of tripling, but the idea that this represents a discount, you know, is over the edge. So this law would be designed to close that loophole and say candidates get the same low rates that stations give their high volume advertisers throughout the course of the year.

BOB GARFIELD:And the reason the political advertisers are subject to this tripling of rates is that the lowest rate only applies to advertising that you book far in advance. But if it's the end of the election and supply and demand rules take over, stations then are allowed to supply whatever the market will bear.

PAUL TAYLOR: That's right. There's also another peculiarity which has to do with the classes in which political advertising is sold, whether it's pre-emptable or not. Nike or, or McDonald's will buy in bulk; they'll buy for a month or a quarter. They want to hit certain demographics and they, they say to the stations, it doesn't really matter to us if it runs at 6 o'clock on a Thursday or 7 o'clock on a, on a Saturday and-- as long as we're hitting the targets we want. Candidates want to buy what's called non-pre-emptable time that can't be bumped, and that tends to be the most expensive time, so they're forced to pay these premiums, and again this law would close that loophole as well.

BOB GARFIELD: Simply put, the low rates go to people willing to fly standby but the politicians want guaranteed reservations.

PAUL TAYLOR: That is correct.

BOB GARFIELD: Now tell me what, what the Alliance for Better Campaigns' interest is in this issue.

PAUL TAYLOR:Candidates and interest groups and, and parties spend about a billion dollars on political ads on television in the last year -- one billion dollars. That's a five-fold increase even after adjusting for inflation over what they spent just 20 years ago. It's by far the largest expense item in modern politics. It is the engine more than anything else that drives the money chase. So one interest is simply to bring that under control and to do something -- you're not going to eliminate the cost of, of communication. Communication costs money. But to do something to at least reduce it.

BOB GARFIELD:All right now the broader campaign finance bill is virtually dead, at least for the moment. Is there any chance that this particular measure will be unbundled from the larger bill and voted on by the Congress?

PAUL TAYLOR: Very little chance because frankly the broadcast lobby is very powerful, and if you had an up or down vote on this measure and this measure alone, the odds are the broadcast lobby could kill it. It got in the McCain-Feingold bill earlier this year, three months ago, with a very strong vote, and then it was inserted into the House bill as well. The broadcasters spent the last month trying to rip it out of the bill. They were not successful. So had this bill come to a vote last week, it would have had this in it. But I think its best chance of going forward is as part of more comprehensive reform.

BOB GARFIELD:In exchange for their broadcast licenses, television and radio stations have some sort of civic responsibilities -- I don't know how explicit they are. Is there any chance that Congress will some day interpret those civic responsibilities to mean you have to give away free broadcast time to political candidates?

PAUL TAYLOR: Well this, this bill, this halfway measure that didn't quite make it to the floor the other day at least is a step in that direction by at least reducing the cost. Part of the problem here is you have, in addition to the economic clout of a very important industry, you also have the self-interest of members of Congress. Now on the surface the self-interest would seem to be, sure, they want lower priced ads! Who doesn't want to get things for less money? But the truth of the matter is a lot of members of Congress say to themselves, you know, the expensive politics, the high dollar ads are actually pretty good for me. Because you know what -- yeah, it's going to cost me more money, but so will it cost my challenger more money - and I do better - I, a member of Congress already in, you know, do better raising money and I do better in a high dollar environment!

BOB GARFIELD: The fortress of incumbency.

PAUL TAYLOR: Exactly. This is a tough hill to climb, no question.

BOB GARFIELD: Very well! Paul Taylor, thanks very much!

PAUL TAYLOR: Thank you!

BOB GARFIELD: Paul Taylor is the executive director for the Alliance for Better Campaigns.