All have plenty of legislators in their deep pockets. It’s a tough call, but one lobby looms above the rest, scarfing up tens of billions from the public trough. One lobby got itself excluded from the campaign finance-reform bill that will pass Congress later this week. One interest group–and one alone–is capable of defeating mom and apple pie, if it comes to that.
Broadcasters.
Let’s review in reverse, starting with the apple pie. You may recall that at the 2000 Republican Convention, Laura Bush urged American parents to turn off the TV more often and read to their children. President Bush has repeatedly delivered the same message. Who could argue with that? Studies show that American children spend only one sixth as much time talking to their parents every day as they do in front of the television (four hours, at latest count). Less TV is strongly correlated with academic achievement.
Picking up on that research, parents have begun mobilizing for TV timeouts. In recent years, the Washington-based TV Turnoff Network has convinced 40 governors and dozens of local governments to issue proclamations for an annual TV Turnoff Week. But state legislatures have been a harder sell. Even a symbolic, innocuous-sounding resolution is too much for the broadcasters. They want that TV on, and they’ll twist a few arms to make sure it stays that way.
For instance, this week, the Rules Committee of the Virginia State Senate voted unanimously against a resolution to promote TV Turnoff Week. It’s not that the lawmakers dislike proclamations. According to The Washington Post, the Rules Committee had no problem approving Virginia Mentoring Month, Vietnamese-American Freedom Fighters Day and a host of other such resolutions. But it turns out that TV Turnoff Week, beginning April 22, overlaps with a sweeps period. So the Virginia Association of Broadcasters paid a little visit to all 15 state senators on the Rules Committee. The $6.5 million in campaign contributions spread around Richmond by the broadcast, cable and Internet industries couldn’t have hurt either.
In Washington, the broadcasters are even more formidable. Sen. John McCain says they are the “No. 1 most powerful lobby in this city,” which is saying something. One of the most important features of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance-reform package now clearing the Congress was that television stations offer the lowest unit cost for political ads, a measure that would have helped to take money out of politics (most of which is spent on TV advertising).
Remember, these are the public airwaves, set aside in part for public use under the original law establishing the Federal Communications Commission. In the old days, if a station didn’t show some commitment to the public interest, it risked having its license yanked.
Nowadays, the only thing getting yanked are the chains of legislators. McCain estimates that 300 members of the House are in bed with the National Association of Broadcasters and thus voted to strip the low-priced TV time provision from the bill. It’s not just the campaign money that legislators crave; they also need to stay in the good graces of station owners in their districts. If they tick off the local broadcasters, members of Congress fear they could find themselves blacked out when the next election rolls around.
It’s not a matter of negative coverage–just no coverage, in the same way that these broadcasting issues receive almost no attention on TV networks. Apparently challenging the power of broadcasters in Washington is not considered to be a good career move for aspiring television reporters. On CNBC’s “Capital Report” this week, McCain told anchors Tyler Mathison and Alan Murray that the political clout of broadcasters “has not been well discussed on TV, to put it mildly.”
The real outrage occurred in the mid-1990s, when a series of votes in Congress gave the broadcasting industry a $70 billion windfall in free spectrum space for digital TV. This highly lucrative piece of broadcasting real estate was just handed to private industry in exchange for a series of vague promises that are already being ignored. Even an irate Bob Dole, then Senate majority leader, was powerless to stop the giveaway; the lobby was just too strong. With the economy in recession, $70 billion is real money–enough to balance the budget or solve almost any social problem imaginable. But it’s long gone.
For all of the carping about campaign-finance reform, it’s a step in the right direction. But as McCain and other supporters have long indicated, it’s only a step. Congress needs to muster the courage to take on the broadcasters. As it happens, the politicians aren’t getting much coverage anyway; local stations are choosing weather and fluff. All of those votes for the industry didn’t yield more coverage back in the district after all. So why not show a little more spine on Capitol Hill? It’s a tough battle, but not impossible. The NRA, Sierra Club and other powerful lobbies got steamrolled on campaign-finance reform, which they bitterly opposed (though it will likely end up helping them). Now perhaps the moment has arrived for broadcasters to face the music. Let TV Turnoff Week begin by tuning out the lobbyists.
