It’s no surprise that a tsunami of corporate and union money is splashing into media coffers this election season. According to a study by the Center for Public Integrity, independent groups—organizations not officially affiliated with political parties— are expected to pour $500 million into political advertising for this year’s elections. That’s way over and above the $300 million that went into the 2006 elections, the last elections in the middle of a presidential term.
The issue here isn’t just money, but disclosure. In January, when the Supreme Court handed down its decision in the Citizens United case—the decision that lifted restrictions on political advertising by corporations and unions—Justice Kennedy said the adverse impact of that game-changing ruling would be offset by the disclosure requirements of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002. In other words, citizens seeing ads could also see who paid for the ads, and evaluate them accordingly.
But according to statistics tallied by Public Citizen, those requirements haven’t been working as well as Kennedy implied that they should. Public Citizen’s figures show that in 2004, 97.9 percent of organizations disclosed the identities of the donors who funded their “electioneering communications.” In 2006, the figure was 96.8 percent. But in 2008, it had dropped to 49.3.
This year it’s 31.8—a dramatic fall from four years ago.
And of 10 organizations that issued election-related ads favoring Democrats in this year’s primary season, five disclosed their donors’ identities, while only one of 10 groups favoring Republicans did. Furthermore, the Republicans moved in the rigid lockstep that now dominates their repertoire to block a bill that would have unmasked donors by requiring more disclosure.
America sees every day the results of having a Congress composed less of public servants than of people in what amount to freelance businesses supported by corporate donors; their loyalty to the donors often trumps their loyalty to voters. One former senator has said he and his colleagues spent nearly a third of their time in office fundraising.
Yet the history of campaign finance reform on federal and state levels is disillusioning. In Massachusetts, a campaign finance reform measure passed in 1998 with overwhelming public support was killed by state legislators with no regard for their constituents’ wishes. One reason for the dismal fate of reform measures may lie in a factor not often considered: the media prefer business as usual, as ever-rising tides of money flow into television outlets and newspapers.
