THE FCC MUZZLE ON CORPORATE POLITICAL SPEECH
- MARCH 31, 2011
The FCC Muzzle
A new attempt to silence corporate free speech.
- Congress tried and failed last year to limit corporate political speech in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, but the threat hasn’t gone away. The new liberal hope is that the Federal Communications Commission will do the deed.
Liberal activists at the Media Access Project filed a petition last week asking the FCC to re-interpret decades of law to require that groups that run political ads disclose the names of their top donors. The 1934 Communications Act already requires any group paying for an ad—whether commercial or political—to disclose its identity as part of the ad. But liberals want President Obama’s FCC to stretch this reading to require the on-air disclosure of any donor providing 25% or more of funding. (The petition is unclear whether that means funding for the ad or for the group.) They also want the FCC to require ad buyers to disclose in public records all financial backers who contribute more than 10% of their budget.
The goal here is to use “transparency” to intimidate businesses out of making political donations. Disclosure sounds good, but liberals have begun to wield it as a weapon to vilify business donors. Exhibit A was last year’s smearing of Target Corp., after it donated to an independent group that ran ads supporting Minnesota GOP gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer. MoveOn.org twisted the contribution into a claim that Target was “anti-gay” and organized a boycott of Target stores. The company stopped donations.
The petition is an end run around Congress, which has never required such disclosure. The petition also seems to have pulled the 25% and 10% disclosure thresholds out of thin air, because it makes no attempt to justify them. The FCC has jurisdiction over radio and TV broadcasters, so such a rule wouldn’t apply to cable stations or newspapers—creating different disclosure standards for different media.
Rule-making at the FCC takes the better part of a year, which would conveniently put this new interpretation on the books in the run-up to the 2012 election—in time to chill corporate donations to political groups. The FCC is supposed to be independent, but Democrats now have a 3-2 majority among commissioners and the Obama Administration supports new transparency rules.
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said during his 2009 confirmation hearings that he opposed using the FCC to implement such restrictions on speech as the Fairness Doctrine. He has remained silent on this proposal, while the two other Democratic Commissioners have endorsed the Media Access Project petition. Commissioner Michael Copps says the FCC should “exercise the authority I believe it already possesses” to impose the new rules.
This is the same FCC that last year dictated net neutrality rules that Congress had also rejected. If Republicans can’t stop the FCC from imposing backdoor restrictions on speech, they can make clear that partisan rule-making will jeopardize its funding.
