Perhaps? Or maybe an idle threat in a political relationship soured. This Chronicle article, available on SFGate, reports that a San Francisco Supervisor has filed a complaint against a blog for violating city campaign finance rules. In pertinent part:

After months of being subjected to unflattering coverage in an online news site, San Francisco Supervisor Chris Daly took the extraordinary step Tuesday of calling for an investigation into whether the Web outlet had violated city campaign finance laws.

Daly said an April 1 fundraiser held by the founder of the Web site, the San Francisco Sentinel, had been attended by a number of local politicians and brought in $5,000 for the online publication. The supervisor said that showed that the Sentinel was a political action committee and should file finance reports required by city law.

Wow. $5,000. How you gonna spend that kind of money . . . ? More:

The FEC has closed the file in MUR 5540, where allegations were made that CBS and the Kerry campaign coordinated a false story on 60 Minutes Wednesday in an effort to defeat Bush. (Yes, that one. You remember. Texas National Guard. MSWord typeface.)

When enforcement matters are closed in high profile cases, Commissioners sometimes include statements explaining their reasoning. There were five statement in all filed in this case. Here is the Statement of Reasons signed by Commissioners Smith and Mason on the "press exemption" question, in its entirety (stripped of two short footnotes):

While we approve of the Counsel’s recommendation to dismiss this case, and join in another Statement of Reasons , we wish to add one short point.

Because of the legal position taken by the Commission, which we believe is inescapable, it was not necessary to investigate the validity of the allegations in the complaint. By dismissing without a factual investigation, the Commission essentially holds that even if the allegations in the complaints are true, there is no violation of the law. Taking those allegations as true, however, would mean that there was an intentional effort by CBS to sway the election against George W. Bush, undertaken in coordination with the rival Kerry campaign. In other words, if the allegations are true, a large corporation intentionally or recklessly put false documents on the nation’s airwaves, in coordination with a candidate’s campaign, with the knowledge that its story would directly reach millions of voters and indirectly reach millions more, all for the purpose of influencing the election, and could do so merely because the corporation claims to be “press.” Given that, we can find no statutory, constitutional, or especially, policy justification that would deny the so-called press exemption to any periodical publisher of political news or views, whether publishing in print, by broadcast, or over the internet.

Here's a neglected nuance in the “how do we regulate the Internet” debate I've been curious about. How should the law treat Internet communications by foreign nationals? It makes no sense to me to punish foreign bloggers residing in the US when any blogger anywhere can reach American readers.

Many foreign nationals who want to post about US politics, discuss candidates, and be political may be beyond the jurisdiction of the FEC, as they’re hanging out in someplace like Paris, Tokyo, or Doha.
But many others may be American residents, here legally on educational or cultural visas, or whose citizenship has not been completed, who have opinions.

They could unwittingly think they can express them on a blog and in emails, assuming such personal and limited activity to be an extension of standing on a streetcorner and talking — which last I checked was an activity available to non-citizens.

Without some kind of safe harbor or exemption, under existing campaign finance regulations, the first dollar spent on such electoral advocacy is illegal. See 11 CFR 110.20(f).

How many dollars dance on the head of a link? Unavoidably, such questions continue to arise as the FEC considers its rules regulating political activity over the Internet. I seems to me, though, that these kinds of questions need not cloud the horizon if the Commission embraces the notion that press is what people “do,” not what some people “are.”

The rulemaking has been devoted to determining what internet activities are “public communications” that require disclaimers and other regulations, whether the press exemption applies to internet journalism, and whether campaign volunteers and independent citizens can use their computers free from restricting.

But, the core truth here is that campaign finance is about valuation. The rub is that value may not be what you would think.

Typically, when a contribution of services - also called an in-kind contribution- is made, the Commission looks at the usual or normal charge that the contributed goods or services would fetch in the market. That only makes sense. If a campaign supporter provides free printing, then the value of that contribution is what he would have charged, not what the ink and paper cost to him.