I forgot that political parties had to pay for TV time in the US and how this influences elections. In Germany, we actually have (nearly?) the system Joel describes with equal time for everybody which has some interesting consequences:
* I don't think campaign financing is that big of a deal in Germany
* There are a lot of TV ads from politically extreme or plain weird parties during election time. There also is a satirical party that makes pretty funny ads.
* The politically extreme parties can refund their advertising costs if they are above a certain threshold of votes, which causes some controversy
Edit for clarity: of course every party can refund their expenses, but for politically extreme parties this is controversial
What I like about Joel's approach is that it doesn't limit speech, but instead expands it online. I have no idea if Google (et al) would go for such a thing, essentially giving away ad time for free / cheap, but it's a great idea. YouTube has already sponsored debates where candidates take questions from the public (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNN-YouTube_presidential_debate...) so it's not unthinkable.
> considered unconstitutional because you're limiting freedom of speech.
Then amend the constitution to allow this particular limit on freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is not a sanctum that has to be protected at all cost, even if we can see how it leads to the whole system going down the toilet.
Enforcing copyright is a form of limiting freedom of speech and the constitution obviously has no problems with it. If I cant publicly repeat what somebody else said because the speech is copyrighted, this is limiting my freedom of speech. I dont see that freedom of speech can be freely limited here (not only limited, but life+70yrs limited, meaning from my finite-lifespan point of view prohibited forever) but but somehow cant be limited to fix the utterly broken political/election system.
The problem with this proposal is that it specifically puts restrictions not just on speech in general, but on political speech. Allowing the government to mandate the content of political speech and media would set a dangerous precedent for the future, even if that wasn't the intent of the amendment.
And while technically speaking requiring that the LeafStorm News Network has to provide equal airtime for all political candidates might be more "fair," if I own the news network I should be able to accept or reject advertisers as I see fit, and if people don't think it's fair they can start their own news networks. Now if I voluntarily said, "I'm providing ten minutes of ad airtime each day for the candidates in this race free of charge, with no extra advertising permitted, and no PACs either," then that is well within my rights as a network owner, but it's not something we should require everyone to do.
Your news network depends on natural monopolies derived from public goods, such as frequency and orbital allocations for OTA and satellite broadcast and exclusive property access for cable networks. It seems "fair" to expect some kind of public access in return for the exclusive use of those public goods.
"Start their own news networks" is easy to say and impossible to do for many groups. Not all interests are represented by money; there are valuable causes that could never motivate enough donations to compete.
From Wikipedia about "Citizens United v. FEC": "the First Amendment prohibits government from placing limits on independent spending for political purposes by corporations and unions."
The German system does not place rules on independent spending; it only requires TV channels to provide ad space for political parties that run for office. The amount of space is tied to the relevance of the party, usually measured by the success in the previous election. The TV channel can charge the party 35% of the usual price, this is considered to be the cost price of the channel. [1]
Parties are, of course, allowded to buy additional space, but they would have to pay the usual price. In other words, the German law doesn't limit independent spending.
> The amount of space is tied to the relevance of the party
How is this justified? Bigger parties are already popular enough, why should they get more media exposure than unknown parties? This is basically like giving the winner of one race a time advantage in the next race, making it even more difficult for other contestants to catch up.
It's a law. The justification is that it's made by democratically elected representatives. It's also not that much of a problem since we have a 5% barrier. Smaller parties usually have less money to spend on TV ads, anyway.
Note that this didn't prevent new parties to become popular. In the last 25 years or so, Germany has seen the rise of the Green party, and the Left party. Today, the Pirate Party seem to be on the rise. It seems to be a rather stable yet permeable system.
Sounds like ye need to change your free speech laws. After all, you can't shout fire in a crowded theatre because it would harm the public good. Likewise, surely only giving one political party airtime harms the public, in the long run.
> After all, you can't shout fire in a crowded theatre because it would harm the public good.
That's not true; there's no general "harming the public good" exception to the First Amendment. There are exceptions for lying (i.e., making false statements with knowledge that they are false (or with reckless disgard of whether they are false) and intent to deceive), and that's the actual reason why it is unprotected to falsely shout "fire" in a crowded theater.
> After all, you can't shout fire in a crowded theatre because it would harm the public good.
How does it "harm the public good" to shout fire in a crowded theater when there actually is a fire?
What? Your public good rule is more complex? That's your plan to avoid the law of unintended consequences? (Of course, many of those so-called unintended consequences aren't actually unintended so much as things that one isn't willing to argue for.)
YouTube sponsoring the debate gave them valuable exposure and audience participation which has positive value. Google giving away ad space has neither of these benefits.
If there was a way to opt out of exposure to political advertising (kind of like can-spam and do-not-call lists), and most Americans adopted this option, maybe it would remove the motivation to exercise this 1st amendment right.
All google has to do is 'give' x ad views before some videos on youtube, for each candidate. If someone tries to get Google to do otherwise, they're limiting GOOGLE'S freedom of speech.
It's a nice thought, but Google could be seen as making campaign donations in kind by doing so -- given that there's a monetary value associated with such media placements. Unless I'm mistaken, that's still illegal under current campaign financing laws.
That said, if Citizens United is any indication, Google could simply donate the money to buy the placements to a Super PAC, which could then buy the placements for each candidate back from Google. Sort of a silly workaround, but hey, it might be a fun way to subvert the outcome of Citizens United.
Recently, in 2010, before the last presidential election (2011) here in Argentina, we had by decree a 'political reform'. It would have been far better to do it by law, but there was such a short time before campaigns started.
Some of the most important changes introduced by the new system are:
- Inability to be a candidate, to people condemned for crimes against humanity (in our case, mainly former members of the dictatorial government from 1976-1983).
- A party needs to have at least 0.4% of the electoral roll as its members, to be able to participate in the electoral process.
- Only physical persons can donate to the campaign. Donations from companies are prohibited.
- The government will give money to the parties to develop their respective campaigns in this way: 50% of the total to be divided equally between all parties. The other 50% based on the amount of votes from the last election.
- Contracting advertisement in audiovisual media and radio by political groups is prohibited.
- Publicity in audiovisual media will be paid by the government, and the function of distributing spaces that can be up to 10 percent of broadcast time among all the contending groups in all media for the purpose of developing their political campaigns is assigned to the National Electoral Directorate; the NED will assign 50% equally between all parties. The other 50% based on the amount of votes from the last election.
The end result: Lots of ugly TV spots in the months previous to the election day. But everyone had the chance to speak in prime time TV spots and deliver their message. Some of the spots were really bad (mostly, the smaller parties... they lacked of the experience I guess).
I can't tell for sure, but I bet that corporations, being prohibited to donate money directly, stimulated their top management to donate (and their families), and then gave them bonuses (so, repaying the money). So, its all the same game. It's very hard to change how politics work.
You missed an important point: the ruling party in Argentina uses the state TV for propaganda. So all these rules only put in disadvantage other parties except the ruling party.
We have the same system in Brazil. People are watching soap opera at home, then all channels cut to a long string of short (<1 min) presentations for all candidates. Most of them are trashy.
The main problem is that people just turn the TV off for that period, and the candidates battle for the other TV spots.
Maybe targeted online ads could help this. Imagine Google helping select candidates based on your profile, like they do with other advertisement.
In Germany, it's not one long string of all candidates, but the TV channels have certain slots between shows that are semi-randomly assigned (semi-randomly in that each spot is shown equally often), with one party per slot.
That way it's a fair chance for every candidate, and people have less an incentive to turn off the TV - it's just one ad, after all.
In Canada the government used to give funds to each party that had more than x seats in the parliament. One of the first things the current neo-con government did was abolish that, and let donations from individuals and businesses fund each party. It's disgusting to be honest - businesses always have deeper pockets and could care less (actually actively oppose) individual liberty.
In fact, businesses (companies) are not permitted to donate to political parties in Canada. And this same "neo-con" government has lowered the maximum personal donation from $5000 per person to $1000 per person.
If anything, this has encouraged a more 'grassroots' approach to fundraising, as it's more the number of people you can engage, rather than a particular (wealthy) demographic.
If only the established parties who already have seats in parliament get funding, does that favor the establishment and make it difficult for new parties to win seats? Genuinely curious.
If you're still interested: the funding is / was distributed by number of votes, not number of seats won. Any party that gets over 2% of the vote gets a cut, which means the threshold for entry is fairly low.
Of course, a party with 50% of the vote will still get 50% of the money, which does favour incumbents.
I don't follow the ins and outs of Canadian politics quite as closely as perhaps I should, but I was under the impression that the federal funding still exists. Wikipedia[1] seems to agree:
> For each registered federal political party that received at least 2% of all valid votes the last general election or at least 5% of the valid votes in the electoral districts in which it had a candidate, the per-vote subsidy, also referred to as the "government allowance", gives the party an inflation-indexed subsidy each year of $2.04 per vote received in the last election.
Now, Wikipedia can be inaccurate, I know, but major changes like this do tend to get documented, and major pages like this tend to have a lot of people watching it, so I'm reasonably confident in this content.
If you have a citation which refutes this, however, please do share because I'd hate to walk around believing false facts.
I like how you refuted me with another part of my own link. I'm embarrassed to have missed it.
It seems to be a fair bit worse than you've stated, actually. One of the citations in that section leads to a Globe and Mail article[1] which states that the subsidy will be phased out over the next few years:
> The government said it will introduce legislation to gradually reduce the allowance of $2 a year per vote by increments of 51 cents starting on April 1 of next year until it is eliminated by 2015-16.
I'm assuming that means that the subsidy won't appear at all in the 2015-2016 budget, which means that it will actually be gone by the time the next election rolls around in October 2015. Hopefully the NDP will be able to get enough seats to bring it back after the election, preferably alone but possibly with the Liberals.
Incidentally, I was surprised to find that the subsidy has only existed since the beginning of 2004. I suppose that has a lot to do with my age, since I wasn't quite 19 then, and anything that happens before the first time you vote tends to be regarded as "the way it's always been."
About Joel's second point: Why would Google/Facebook give free ads only for U.S. politicians? If they start with that, shouldn't they do that for every other country as well? Sure for the moment nominally their HQs are in the U.S. but they are multinational corporations, with huge HQs in Ireland and several other countries as well.
Yep. To me, it's one of those issues where opening the floodgates to free one-sided political ads should result in an investigation (EU-style). A business with such dominant platforms shouldn't be pushing political agendas (on said platforms), even if we agree with them.
That applies equally to other services from Apple, Amazon, Sony, Microsoft, Comcast, Time Warner, BSkyB, Virgin Media etc.
* I don't think campaign financing is that big of a deal in Germany
* There are a lot of TV ads from politically extreme or plain weird parties during election time. There also is a satirical party that makes pretty funny ads.
* The politically extreme parties can refund their advertising costs if they are above a certain threshold of votes, which causes some controversy
Edit for clarity: of course every party can refund their expenses, but for politically extreme parties this is controversial