Campaign Finance Reform And Milly's Tavern

If you're in Manchester, New Hampshire tonight, stop by Milly's Tavern, where the state's slam poetry team - Slam Free Or Die - holds its weekly public poetry competitions. Tonight's slam will be just a bit different, since it will be filmed by MTV. The media has descended on New Hampshire for the Republican Primary election on Tuesday, and they're hitting all the hot spots, like Milly's.

The poetry team is managed by a long-running buddy movie starring Mark and Sam. Sam, my son, has been calling me daily with stories of finding CNN people in a coffee shop, MSNBC in a favorite bar: the world's media are everywhere in his small city of 110,000. Sam told me that when the media people required a Republican voter with a beer in his hand, one was promptly produced, an interview to order.

MTV will film the poets and their fans for a larger documentary on young people and the election. No harm, right? The poets can perform in front of cameras, money gets added to the New Hampshire economy, no one gets hurt.

Except:

Not much is actually happening in New Hampshire. Even less went on in Iowa. Why is our attention so sharply focused on the obscure rituals of some members of one political party? Why is the country's communication apparatus spending all that money at Milly's and elsewhere to tell us about a fake horse race whose outcome is known in advance?

Katy Bachman, who writes for Adweek, tells us that media spending in the 2010 midterm elections was $4.55 billion, up 8% from two years previous. Of that amount, the largest share went to broadcast media ($2.29 billion). The whole article does a fine job of helping us to understand where the political ad money comes from and where it goes:

http://www.adweek.com/news/television/political-media-spending-hits-all-time-high-104027

Harmelin Media predicts a 52% rise in campaign media expenditures in the 2012 campaign over the 2008 presidential election:

http://www.harmelin.com/blog/2011/11/political-advertising-spot-tv-in-2012

I started looking for a comparison to the money flowing between TV and professional sports, but sports media numbers start with "m" - no billions to be found. There's little doubt, political campaigns are generating huge income for the professed objective journalists who cover them. Why are these expenditures rising? Many pundits point to what we might call the Meg Whitman effect - the increasing willingness of fabulously rich people to run for office (she spent $50 million of her own money and lost). And all of them mention the recent court decision allowing unlimited campaign expenditures by super PACSs.

The way most media sell air time is by using ratings services. They present survey results to the people who buy media that say, for example: we can deliver 200,000 eyeball pairs to you between 8 and 10 PM on a weeknight, and 28% of them will be undecided white males between 35 and 60 years of age. And the media buyer, having done her own surveys that show this to be a teetering demographic she needs to influence, decides to run ads in that time slot on that station.

The price of the ad time is fixed by the market demand for the audience's purported attention. If the group is small or less desirable demographically, the price goes down. If it's more and "better" people, they charge more money.

The TV news people therefore have a direct financial interest in inducing people to watch their station, so they can gain a greater amount of the money available to be spent on media. How do they do this?

They create a horse race. They flood us with titillation, and trivia. They search for conflict of any sort, and they pander to whatever demographic they think they can sell, not just to political campaigns but also to advertisers, as one presumes MTV will do with its Milly's Tavern footage when selling ad time to the acne cream folks.

The eight thousand people who came out for the Iowa caucus weren't voting in a primary or selecting anyone to do anything. They were just a demographically skewed (about triple the percentage of evangelical Christians as in the general population, for example) party stalwarts doing what they've been doing for years - getting a sense of candidate popularity by literally moving to one side of a room or another to show a current preference.

The US media made a huge amount of money by misreporting the Iowa Caucus. They'll make even more money in New Hampshire, hyping an imaginary horse race when in fact Mr. Romney is ahead by more than 20 percentage points. A minor event is being grossly inflated to produce profit for the companies that own the media outlets.

If they want to make money this way, why should we care? Who gets hurt if Wolf and Cokie want to have some fun?

First, we pay. The billions of dollars misspent on these fictionalized races comes from our pockets - directly through our campaign contributions and checkoffs, or indirectly through the prices we pay to companies and the dues we pay to unions - who fund those super PACs that buy the media time.

Right & Left Leaning Bird, by Jan

Second, by reframing our elections as sports events, the actual issues and important differences between and among candidates are warped or obscured when they don't fit the "narrative" created by media executives. Our democratic process is distorted, stunted - even thwarted.

Third, our democracy skews increasingly towards rich people and adept fundraisers getting into office, and the temptations of financial corruption can overcome otherwise decent citizens who get elected. Money needed to get elected becomes the goal not the means.

Doing something about the illicit partnership between media and politicians is tricky. How can you get your story out - how can the campaign finance reform people let us know what we need to know - when the very entity that should be enlightening citizens has a gargantuan financial stake in obscuring that information? Do you trust the media people to reliably explain events to us when their chauffeured cars and entourages and very high pay depend on a self-serving lie? I don't.

A footnote about public media, PBS and NPR and that bunch. Why do they play the game? I think their dependance on horserace politics is more nuanced than it is with the overtly commercial media. Mostly public outlets have to run their operation in an environment where their single-digit listener share is bathed in the commercial media horserace. If public media could be a real alternative in reporting, why aren't they? There are two answers. One is, yes, much of the fair and responsible mainstream political reporting is found in the public media.

But second, the public media are notoriously timid. If you're tempted to blame their flaccid political reporting on fear of government backlash, the numbers aren't supportive. For National Public Radio, the government provides less than 6% of their income, while corporations are more than 20%. The highest share is from individuals - 34%. People who contribute to public TV and radio can do a better job of insisting on high quality, non-horserace reporting. Those of us who pay the largest share can insist on a real alternative to the bought-and-sold commercial media.

Our political process is a multi-billion dollar industry that produces lousy TV, while undermining our system of representational democracy. Using the small targeted media of blogs and Twitter and Facebook, and church discussions and every other form of independent communication, we can save ourselves by reforming our campaign finance system - it can be done - to separate our media and our politicians from their pernicious embrace.