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March 08, 2005
John McCain: The Stuff of Regulatory Nightmares
Today I’ve been reading at Michelle Malkin, Captain’s Quarters, and the Democracy Project that Senator McCain, of the infamous BCRA, seems to be taking advantages of loopholes in his very own campaign finance reform bill.
Specifically the allegations are that his Reform Institute raises money to promote him; the institute pays a six figure “consulting fee” to one of McCain’s advisors; and the institute has received $200,000 from a company which McCain then began formally supporting politically. This was all very interesting, but what I found most interesting was the mention of McCain’s bill introduced in the Senate a few weeks ago entitled “Localism in Broadcasting Reform Act of 2005”
In McCain’s press release, he says that the reason for the act is that local broadcasting stations are not spending enough time on local elections. He seems to believe that this is responsible for recent increases in election related advertising. I’ll point out something to him that my father pointed out to me years ago: correlation does not mean causation. Just because local coverage decreases and advertising increases does not mean that the first caused the second. It could mean that the second caused the first, or that they were both caused by some third factor. Both of those options seem like plausible possibilities that should be explored. For instance, perhaps people are so sick of the advertising that they want to see less coverage, and the local stations are responding to this.
Furthermore, unlike what McCain seems to think, requiring local stations to provide more coverage of elections does not necessarily reduce the amount of money spent, even if you accept his premise that this would lead to less advertising. If campaigns are spending less money on advertising, then stations have to get that money from somewhere else. Either their advertising rates increase and other companies take on that burden, or the station makes less money, which means that the owners of and workers at the stations get less money. The last option seems far more likely, seeing as how stations tend to give viewers what they want and viewers don’t seem to want to see more candidates on the television, thus advertisers are less likely to buy advertising during those times and the station will be forced to charge less.
McCain says that his bill will “reduce the license term for broadcasters from eight years to three years, thereby requiring broadcasters to provide the FCC with information every three years on why their license should be renewed” and “would require the full Commission to review five percent of all license and renewal applications, and would command broadcasters to post on their Internet sites information detailing their commitment to local public affairs programming.”
Let’s take a look at that bill, as politicians always seem to leave out pertinent things in press releases.
Here is the full text of the bill. This is my summary.
Sections 1&8: Title and definitions.
Section 2: Reduces the term of broadcast licenses from 8 years to 3.
Section 3: Requires the full FCC Commission to review at least 5% of the license requests every year.
Section 4: “Require[s] every broadcaster to file, electronically, a copy of its public interest issues and programs list and its children's programming reports … within 10 days after the end of each calendar quarter.” Also requires broadcast stations with websites and the FCC to provide this information to the public.
Section 5: States that in order to get a renewal of their license, a licensee’s other stations must also be reviewed.
Section 6: It’s already in the law that “parties of interest” may file a petition with the FCC to deny a license. This act designates that to be a party of interest, all a person must do is be a listener or viewer of the station (which is not dependant on where they live) and “assert an interest in vindicating the general public interest.”
Section 7: Gives the FCC 9 months to do certain things such as consider standardized forms for submission of reports.
Sections 2,3,7, and part of 4 were included in the press release. But what about the rest of section 4, which requires each station to submit their public interest/children’s programming every three months. I admit I don’t know what the current requirement for this is, but this is still a pretty important part.
Section 5 also seems like a biggie. Unless an owner has the licenses of all of their stations come up at the same time, they would have to pull together all of the pertinent information on all of their stations more often than every three years, which is already quite a change from every eight years. How much more work will this create for stations, not to mention for the FCC, who is already going to have more to do because of sections 2 and 3. Every government regulation you add creates more taxpayer spending to enforce it. And let’s not forget the question of why it should be legal for the FCC to require all of your stations to be reviewed to get a license for one. That’s like requiring a review of all of my children’s educations in order for one child to get into college. Why not judge each station on its own merit?
Section 6 also seems like a big deal. This opens the window for all sorts of people to attempt to deny a station a license. Just how many times does a person have to listen or view a station to be counted as a “listener” or “viewer”? Since residence does not matter, does that mean listening to a radio station a few times over the internet would count? Would we get local special interest groups claiming that the local station does not work in the public interest because they don’t give any coverage to their group? Would I be able to complain about a station because I listen a syndicated show of theirs from the other side of the nation? And of course, this would enable McCain to give trouble to just about any station every three years. After all, we already know he has “an interest in vindicating the general public interest.”
All this for whatever the government deems to be in the general public interest. There’s no question, of course, if this is something the general public actually wants or needs.
Posted by illuminaria at March 8, 2005 03:13 PM