Campaign Finance Reform, TV Ad Spending, and the FCC

I live in L.A., and if (as I suspect) in the fall and winter of 2007 a lot of Angelenos didn't pay much attention to the huge baseball team of Democratic Party candidates for president, it's because our company town was gripped by the Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike.

Writers for TV and film went on a 100-day long walkout in order to win concessions from the studios on teeny weeny residual payments for material written for broadcast and distributed online. That mess took til February 2008 to resolve, and even then some people still aren't happy with the results.

What that means is that the WGA strike dented the bottom lines of tv and cable outlets. With no fresh tv shows to put on the air, advertisers didn't want their ads appearing next to bottom-of-the-barrel dreck as opposed to high-quality narrative one-hour drama or half-hour comedies they were originally sold, and promised. Studios bluffed hardball to those uppity writers (can you imagine? getting paid for work done? the very thought), but were genuinely worried about the strike's effect on the Oscars broadcast and late night shows.

What does this have to do with revenues from political tv ads? Well, a person who heard it from the horse's mouth himself (where horse=Jeff Zucker) said the head of NBC was looking to to pad what started as a Very Bad Year with political ad purchases from the Democratic and Republican primaries as well as non-stop wall-to-wall Olympics coverage, a claim that has since been borne out by this recent piece of news here.

So if the tv coverage of the Democratic primary season has seemed even more sensationalistic, more lurid, more issue-free, more silly than usual, as well as needlessly LONG, then it's because our primary season has been all of that PLUS our two final-round candidates have needed to buy political ads.*

A study by the Wisconsin Advertising Project has just been released that shows the volume of money we're talking about when it comes to political ads: "Television stations are big winners in the '08 campaign." Get this: $200 million was spent between Republican and Democratic contenders since the fall of 2007. ($200 million is just under the entire Gross Domestic Product of the country of Tonga according to IMF figures.)

Some of this is unavoidable: given the sheer size and scale of our country, it'd be impossible for a candidate to bring his or her message to every single corner. So political tv ads are here to stay, and some would say that it's a good thing if it's one more way for voters to stay informed. No question about it, ads are expensive--several hundred thousand dollars and up per 30 second ad in a large media market.

But, consider the value of what we get in tv ads and tv political coverage versus the information delivered. I for one could've done without the non-stop airings of a certain minister's words (while coverage of the OTHER minister, the one who believes in scary ghost stories like The End of the World Occurs When Jewish People All Go "Back" to Israel and he acts on these beliefs in a political way, has been almost nil). Or what if there had been 50% less bitterness over Bittergate? It was an issue many American voters, as measured by polls at least, said a giant WHO CARES? to. And I certainly could've done without Alex Castellano's defiant, smugly UNremorseful use of the 'B' word to describe the female senator from NY--and about a zillion other instances of cavemanlike sexism by male newsreporters and pundits.

What I'm suggesting is that the big business of corporate media is an agenda separate from--if not inimical to--the best interests of informing the American people. Infotainment fattens the bottom line. This primary season we happened to have an exciting race, or what amounted to the best high-stakes reality show on tv. (Just WHO will get voted off Nominee Island?) Information, the unlovely and non-revenue generating stepchild, is lucky if it can squeeze in there for a scrap of attention.

Just look at CBS. Once considered the best of tv news outfits, CBS News was expensive but enjoyed prestige and its costs were offset by money brought in by ad-supported narrative shows. However, the economics of creating narrative tv shows is starting to weigh against what those studios can recoup, even in syndication or dvd sales of the 3-season set of The O.C.

The WGA strike happened because writers wanted to be paid fairly for material airing in a new medium, but it also happened because corporate media felt, and still feels, that the making of narrative television is too expensive relative to profits returned. That explains why today you see so many reality shows out there. Non-union actors, non-union "story editors" who massage raw footage into understandable form, scant or no sets--these shows are cheap to make and while they don't have a long shelf life (not particularly re-watchable), they do make money in the short term with ads sold against programming.

Question is: how can quality tv news can survive in a climate where it has long been a money-loser, faces an aging audience and an indifferent, time-shifting and "social media"-habituated youth audience, and is no longer underwritten by the profits on the narrative side of the industry?

What I'm also saying is that with the advent of digitally-distributed small-screen information and entertainment, the ad-supported model of tv (and therefore tv news) is broken. It's a dinosaur chewing prehistoric cud while that history-altering meteor speeds from outer space to earth. Above the dinosaur's head is the thought bubble "Wha hoppen?" Well, lately, the internet and the WGA strike, that's what. And also the "fast forward over commercials" button on TiVo.

There's no denying we need high-quality, multiply-sourced journalism to keep ourselves informed and our government honest. But can this survive in an age where the "price" of free tv is a limit on the independence and integrity of what's offered? Where executives in corporate media exert pressure for reporters to frame stories to go along with Bush's "with us or against us" warmongering zeitgeist? (Ask Katie Couric or Jessica Yellin, or Dan Rather at this past weekend's National Conference on Media Reform.)

Maybe one thing Obama can do when he becomes president is overhaul the FCC. If it's not doing much except issuing fines for nipple-slips, and its fangs fell out long ago when it came to enforcing the Fairness Doctrine (which no longer seems to exist), then exactly *what* is that regulatory agency good for? How is the public trust upheld so our airwaves serve our interests?

Overhauling the regulation of public airwaves and putting in place some sort of mandate for limited free airtime devoted to candidate debates would be best for democracy. It would also have the added benefit of reducing the insane amounts of money needed to run for national public office. That could open the doors to more worthy candidates who aren't millionaires to begin with. And also level the playing field among candidates at the early stages of a race who don't yet have the fundraising momentum or name recognition to buy ads, but, like Kucinich, Dodd, Edwards, Richardson (etc), may have excellent policy proposals to add to the debate. Free broadcast airtime for candidates for national office on free tv is not even a new idea--it's one Senators Feingold, Durbin, and yes, McCain came up with in 2002.

The upshot? We the public should demand that private corporations' use of PUBLIC airwaves requires returning a benefit to the selfsame public. Stop the giveaways to corporate media; demand something in return. It'd be good for democracy, and a form of "campaign finance reform" at the same time.

I'd like to see Senator Obama go head to head with Senator McCain on this issue. Who has the nerve to push through free airtime for national candidates as part of campaign finance reform? The one who has forsworn federal lobbyist money (Obama), or the one whose campaign was, til recently, lousy with lobbyists for Time-Warner, NBC, The National Association of Broadcasters, The National Cable and Telecommunications Association, SBC Communications, T-Mobile, Verizon, Qwest, and COMPTEL (McCain)**?

Next, a brief survey of speakers and issues at the National Conference on Media Reform this past weekend.

*Yes, I know political ads are bought in local tv markets. But the national 'nets--ABC/Disney, CBS, NBC/Universal--also own many local tv stations in large markets. So a local tv ad bought at the ABC affiliate in Philadelphia is very likely to be owned by ABC/Disney.

**Who do you think will keep net neutrality safe? The guy who sat on the Senate Commerce committee, which oversees the FCC and telecoms, and is thisclose to all the aforementioned old media/new media lobbyists? I have a bridge to sell you...

Gulp. It's a good thing Cynematic blogs at P i l l o w b o o k, because she will never eat lunch in this town again for suggesting that some airtime be given away AT NO COST. As people are fond of saying around these parts, it's Show Business, not Show Friend, or Show Democracy.

Comments

[daisy]

My husband works in television. He's an engineer, not a salesperson or reporter, but he knows that a competitive election can do a lot for a station's finances. Sounds cynical, but it's the market.

[cynematic]

Daisy,
Sounds like he sees the news sausage being made every day!

It isn't the *only* reason why memes like "Clinton is the winner of the popular vote [mumble if you throw out all the caucus statesand count Puerto Rico mumble]" were completely unquestioned by many news media outlets, but perhaps there was more than a little of not wanting to kill the Lengthy Primary Season Goose That Laid the Golden Egg.

And so announcing, "Popular vote counts are irrelevant to the way the Dem Party nominee is selected" is a total buzzkill and ad-revenue party-ender. Which could be why MSM glossed over this point.

What I'm wondering is if we'll see a giant clash between Olbermann and McCain that gets tamped down or never makes it to air. Or if tv reporting on FCC battles will get any air. (McCain sits on the Senate Commerce Committee, which oversees the FCC.)

After all, I'm still waiting to see tv news reporting on the Pentagon's use of ex-military sock puppets as "talking heads" to help "sell" the Iraq war to the American people--a story that broke in the NYT and dropped like a stone. (See: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/washington/20generals.html and http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003796717).

[Lawyer Mama]

Cyn - I too am wondering about why that story dropped so quickly.