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Bloggers 1, Campaign Regulators 0

Mike Krempasky | November 17, 2005 - 3:00pm | 2 comments | Email This!

Some great news out of the Federal Election Commission today. In a unanimous 5-0 vote, the Commission voted to approve an Advisory Opinion for FiredUp, agreeing that the partisan Democratic sites were entitled to the "press exemption" from campaign finance regulations.

This is a victory for free speech, whether right or left. The fight over these issues is hardly over - and considering the 5-0 vote from the Commission, I'm especially looking forward to the Democracy21 press release calling the FEC a 'feckless agency gripped by partisan deadlock, unable to do anything.'

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Comments

Settling scores

by Jon Garfunkel on November 20, 2005 - 3:36pm

Your headline would be correct, if we take "zero" to mean that the campaign regulators are neutral in this. They don't want to regulate any more than they have to.

You'd need to assign -1 to the potential big losers, the old media, who once upon a time loved to get money from political advertisers. It would seem to be that the end result of this policy is that campaigns can dump unlimited funds into online partisan efforts, and more of the no fingerprints blog smearing that Jan Frel wrote about last month.

Though, ultimately, political blogs will have to choose between being anonymous smear-engines or credible providers of information.

"have to" is a funny phrase, John

by Mike Krempasky on November 23, 2005 - 12:11pm

Which of course, allows their premise to stand that money spent on the Internet is threat if spent by the wrong people - equivalent to, say, funds used to crowd out other advertising on television.

I'm not sure what the supposed choice you offer actually means. Is it government's role to ensure the absence of one and presence of the other? If so - you've got a lot more faith in the state than I do.