FEC commissioner Brad Smith is
interviewed over at the conservative Tech Central Stations regarding FEC regulation of the Internet. Bradley is a Republican on the commission and opposes most campaign regulation as a result. But whatever his overall motives may be, he shows in this passage that he genuinely gets what this issue (regulation of the Internet) is really all about:
SMITH: [...] When we think about who is going to be exempt under the press exemption, I think almost everybody would agree that the big corporations are going to be exempt under press exemption. That is to say that the Washington Post website, well, that's probably exempt. What about Slate, which at one time was owned by Microsoft? Well that's going to be exempt. Why? Because Slate kind of looks and it feels like a newspaper. It comes off the web rather than delivered by paper to my door, but it just has that look and feel and has that kind of sense to it. And then people are going to say, what about maybe a blog such as that run by Glenn Reynolds of InstaPundit or something like that? Well maybe that gets the exemption. But after that it's less clear.
Therefore we are saying if you are a big powerful cooperation, we are going to give you a press exemption for your Internet activity, at least if you are a press operation. And as we work down the line we are not going to give you that exemption. As a result you are going to be stifling the activity of the most grassroots, casual type of political action, rather than that of the big press corporation.
It's particularly odd that we would do this in an era in which most of the mainstream press is owned by large corporations. I don't just mean CBS and NBC and so on being owned by other large corporations. Think about things like station ownership. This was a bit of an issue last fall when Sinclair Broadcasting wanted its stations to air a documentary that many considered a lengthy anti-Kerry commercial rather than a real documentary, whatever that is.
So we are going to say to those folks, well, if you had the power to own a press outlet you are okay and your website is probably going to be okay as well because you are a newspaper or a radio station or what have you. But we're going to say to the pajama-clad blogger in his basement that he doesn't get the press exemption? It seems to me that's exactly the person who we want to be encouraging to be more involved in politics, the person who should get the exemption there [...]
And so is it really such a horrible thing that while those groups, those big corporations, get the press exemption for the kind of things that only a small number of corporations can afford, we would extend the press exemption to something that everybody can afford? [...]
We need to make clear that bloggers are press, these are periodicals and people update them regularly; that the first amendment does not only apply to people who are members of the National Press Club, that it is not limited to people who have a little press card in their hat band like some 1930s movie.
The press is everybody; every citizen has a right to publish his views and to promote his views and if the Internet is blurring a distinction between traditional media and just average citizens, I am not sure that's a bad thing. That's a good thing, a democratizing thing, it is exactly the type of thing that the reformers claimed for years to want. They ought to rejoice in it. That they don't is interesting in itself.
Carol Darr actually stands with those that would restrict the press exemption to Big Corporations -- to those who could afford to buy a press. As she
wrote:
The ramifications of the bloggers' demand are enormous. The issue before the FEC goes to the heart of the fundamental questions that define a democracy's relationship to a free press: Who should be treated as a journalist, and what special privileges, if any, should they receive?
To Darr, this is all about what "special privileges" the moneyed corporate media can enjoy, rather than the realization of citizen media. And she wants the FEC to suddenly become the enforcer of this dictum, that the corporate media should have special privileges denied to citizen media.
Given that she heads an institute tasked with studying the way the Internet and politics intersect, it's interesting to see her play out such hostility toward citizen media, protecting the wealthy haves against the have-not masses. Tech blogger Dana Blankenhorn takes Darr to task over at Corante:
This is a note to the nice people at the Pew Charitable Trusts.
Some of your money has gone astray. Specifically, it has gone to George Washington University for something called the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet, formerly the Democracy Online Project.
GWU put a woman named Carol Darr [...] in charge of this group, and she has proven to be, well, not to put too fine a point on it, an idiot. Clueless, in the parlance of this blog. To be blunt about it, she is using money given for promoting democracy on the Internet in order to destroy it [...]
[Carol Darr] should not be working on the Internet, and trying to get it treated like newspapers or broadcast. It's none of those. It's the Internet. If she doesn't know that then she's either ignorant (in which case she should be elsewhere) or she's lying (in which case she should be elsewhere). I'm sure there are lots of people on K Street who would love to have her.
Bottom line. The purpose of your grant has been perverted, turned toward the opposite of its intended purpose. You need to know this so you can take appropriate action.
Given Smith's comments, it truly is ironic that we have Republican commissioners on the FEC talking about equity between the corporate media and citizen media on the Internet, while so-called "Democrats" like Darr argue on behalf of corporate supremacy in the media sphere.