Some election law experts want the FEC to reverse that policy, saying it gives campaigns the opportunity to use ostensibly independent blogs as fronts to create the illusion of grass-roots support, mount attacks on their opponents and disseminate information to which candidates do not want their names attached.
"The concern is that somebody is blogging at the behest of a campaign and nobody knows it," said Richard L. Hasen, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who maintains a blog on election law.
"If, for example, you are a U.S. Senate candidate and you have a blogger who you're paying to write good things about you and bad things about your opponent, it will eventually come out. But that may not come out until after the election," Hasen said.
"But even if it comes out, there's something to be said for having the information right there, so when you click on the Web site you see it says 'Authorized by Smith for Congress,' " he added. "Voters rely on those pieces of information as cues in terms of how much stock they should put in what someone is saying." . . .
"I think a lot of these things are reasonable as a matter of ethics," said Duncan Black, who runs a popular liberal blog called Eschaton under the pen name Atrios. "But that's different from being reasonable as a matter of law."
Clearly, this is the number one issue for debate from the
Full Notice Of Proposed Rulemaking.
Anyway, I wanted to outline our essential take on this and get your reaction:
- start from the principle of parallelism. Don't regulate the Internet any more stringently than any other medium.
- ethical bloggers already engage in voluntary disclosure. Bloggers have done so and will continue to do so voluntarily because credibility is their most crucial currency, and a blogger later found to have concealed such relationships will soon find himself without any readers.
- To be sure, such information about payment to bloggers would be of interest to many, but the same is true of many other campaign expenditures or contributions which are only disclosed on a quarterly basis, both with regards to the media and otherwise. It would do wonders for the consultant/pundit class to have to disclose all their conflicts of interest every time they appeared in print or on radio/tv, but that's ethics, not law, and there should be no legal obligation should be placed on speakers in this sphere which is not applicable to all.
- No additional disclosure requirement for non-speech activities provided to campaigns by bloggers-as-vendors. It can be covered through normal disclosure rules.
- However, when a campaign pays a blogger for the explicit purpose of publishing favorable stories, this would be "paid advertising" by the campaign (or, alternatively, the blogger is a de facto agent of the campaign), and in those circumstances, a "paid for by" disclaimer is likely appropriate.
- What makes most sense is an across-the-board change in campaign finance law requiring electronic filing of FEC reports (the Senate has exempted itself), along with a change from a quarterly (every three months) cycle to something closer to a 72h cycle for reporting contributions and disbursements. Let's give people the information they need about everything a campaign's doing on more rapid basis, in a format where it's easily searchable.
Let me know what you think. As I've said before, however:
Comments are due on June 3, and if you have any comment you want to make to the FEC regarding these regulations,
you do not need to be a lawyer or have a lawyer. It is
your right and obligation as a citizen to email your comments directly to the FEC at
internet@fec.gov, and I strongly encourage you to do so. Thanks.
note added 05/05/05: This diary originally contained language questioning the accuracy of Brian Faler's reporting. He was right on the Senate Rules thing, and I was wrong, and I apologize. See this diary for more.
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