from my blog, Basie!
This afternoon, I had the opportunity to attend a luncheon at which David Mason, a Commissioner at the Federal Election Commission, spoke. The title of Commissioner Mason's address was "Should Bloggers Be Regulated?", a topic particularly germane to this blog and others.
Mason indicated that he -- along with his fellow FEC Commissioners -- was loath to regulate political activity on the Internet, though court cases have forced his hand on the matter. Although he arrived at this belief from conservative (or libertarian), rather than liberal perspective, it is a conclusion almost all liberal bloggers would agree with.
After the address, I was able to speak with Commissioner Mason for a few moments. To begin with, I asked about his feelings towards Sen. John Thune's (R-SD) payments to bloggers in return for positive coverage.
David Mason: The first pertinent point about the South Dakota situation is to note that it came to light because of existing campaign finance regulations. So rather than pointing to it as a failure, point to it as a success of the existing disclosure regime.
And so the complaint, really, if there is one, is that it was not disclosed contemporaneously with the activity. There are sort of two ways, if you think that's a problem, to go at it.
One is to say in certain circumstances, bloggers who are paid by campaigns are going to have to disclose just the way a campaign ad on radio would include a disclaimer or a campaign direct mail piece would include a disclaimer. The problem with that is that you start to get into some distinctions that are difficult to make in terms of whether the blog belongs to the campaign - in which case yes, it ought to have a disclaimer, just like the campaign's own website - or whether the blog belongs to the person who writes it.
Markos Moulitsas, who runs the Daily Kos, was a paid consultant to the Dean campaign. He did disclose that informally. He said, "I was a consultant to them about how they use the internet and that didn't influence what I print on my blog." So if you ask the Commission to come in and make a decision at what point a payment from a campaign turns an individual's blog into a campaign's blog, it becomes a distinction that's very hard to police. In other words, you're going to find very mushy lines because what you're going to find is that the blogger was already out there doing stuff, and the campaign paid them to get them to do more of what they were already doing and not necessarily to change what they were saying, for instance. So while you could try to do that, I think you'd run into some close calls and great difficulty in defining with any clarity when somebody crossed that line.
The other alternative would be to require some kind of more rapid disclosure from the campaigns. There already exists in the law a statute which could be construed to require continuous, daily disclosure from campaigns. It's conceivable with large campaigns that are already filing electronically, that they could in essence be required to file every 24 or 48 hours. And I think if you're really determined to find out what campaigns are doing, then you ought to be determined whether it's the Internet or something else. And that would probably be a better solution because it takes advantage of a regulation that already exists, technology that already exists, and doesn't require us to go then and make new rules about this issue of when the blog is the blogger's blog and when it's the campaign's blog.
Jonathan Singer: [At the end of the Ohio-02 special election last month, the campaigns were required to file every day.] Is that something that you have the power to...
Mason: No. The Commission does not have the ability to change the dollar thresholds or the reporting frequencies. That would have to be done by Congress. And they could either change those thresholds and frequencies or they could give the Commission the power to change them or increase them. Either way it would require legislation, unless the Commission interprets this existing provision that I mentioned in a way that it hasn't up until now.
Singer: Is that a possibility?
Mason: It's a possibility. It's not something that's going to happen in the next year or two simply because a) it's not something on our front burner, because it takes in issues way beyond this narrow Internet that you asked and b) because the interpretation I've offered is not the only possible interpretation, so if we took that step, it would be very controversial.
[THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.]
for more political interviews and analysis, visit my blog at Basie.org