New York Times Highlights the Perils of Too Much Political Speech

League of Conservation VotersLeague of Conservation VotersThe
lead story
in today’s New York Times provides yet
another illustration of how the paper’s support
for restrictions on political speech distorts its reporting
on the issue. Start with the headline: “Outside Money Drives a
Deluge of Political Ads.” As you might surmise, the article is
about the impact of
Citizens United v. FEC
, the 2010 decision in which the
Supreme Court overturned legal limits on independent spending by
unions and corporations (including nonprofit interest groups) that
might influence elections. The headline is notably more negative
than others that would be equally descriptive, such as,
“Independent Spending Shakes Up Political Campaigns.”

By using the term outside rather than
independent (as reporter Ashley Parker does throughout the
article), the Times implies that the newly legal
advocacy represents some sort of intrusion. But in this context
“outside money” merely means speech by people who do not work
for a candidate or party, a group that includes the overwhelming
majority of Americans. Why should all of those people be considered
“outsiders” whose participation in political debates is suspect?
Should the right to praise or criticize politicians be limited to
“insiders”?

The headline also asserts that Citizens United has
produced a “deluge,” a word that likewise has a negative
connotation. Water imagery is
popular
among critics of Citizens United. In the fall
of 2010, Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation,
worried that “a flood of corporate campaign cash” would sweep away
the foundations of democracy, while President Obama warned that “a
flood of attack ads run by shadowy groups with harmless-sounding
names” would drown out the voices of the disadvantaged. Parker, for
her part, reports that “viewers in Charlotte are swimming in
political ads,” while voters in various other places are “inundated
with ads.”

They may be soaking in it, but apparently they’re not soaking it
in:

Both campaigns and outside groups are worrying about how to
reach voters who, so inundated with ads already, may disengage in
the crucial months before Election Day. A premium, they said, will
be placed on creative commercials that cut through the clutter, as
well as using data and analytics to target critical voters and get
them to vote.

“The irony is that the more political ads air on TV, the more
voters tune them out,” said Mark McKinnon, a veteran Republican
strategist and ad maker. “It just becomes a white noise. The return
on investment is absurd.”

But according to Parker, the ads are worrisome even if voters
ignore them, because the “explosion of spending on political
advertising…is accelerating the rise of moneyed interests and
wresting control from the candidates’ own efforts to reach voters.”
That is bad because the “outside groups,” led by Americans for
Prosperity, the Senate Majority PAC, and the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce, “are dictating the terms and message of the 2014
contests, defining candidates long before the candidates are able
to define themselves and start reaching voters.” Worse, those
“outside groups,” a.k.a. “moneyed interests,” are more interested
in tearing candidates down than in building them up:

It is also easier for outside groups and “super PACs” to
run attack ads, leaving the positive message up to the candidates,
and the result is an increasingly negative sheen to the general
political discourse. “There’s no question that the sheer number of
ads, combined with the fact that voters don’t know who’s paying for
the ad, creates a layer of toxicity in our politics that is very
corrosive,” said Senator Michael Bennet, Democrat of Colorado and
chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

Really? No question at all? Parker does not actually provide any
evidence that political ads are more negative than they used to be
(a perennial complaint) as a result of independent spending. The
one specific example of negative advertising she mentions involves
a message that both a candidate and independent groups supporting
him are emphasizing:

Senator Mark Udall, Democrat of Colorado, and Democratic outside
groups there have been laserlike in their effort to paint his
opponent, Representative Cory Gardner, as “too extreme” on women’s
issues like reproductive rights. In one Senate Majority PAC ad,
images of women flash by as a narrator intones that Mr. Gardner
would push “to outlaw a women’s right to choose, even in cases of
rape and incest.”

The same race, by the way, produced this ad, in which
the League of Conservation Voters attacks Gardner for attracting
support from the “out-of-state oil billionaire Koch Brothers” in
the form of a “smear campaign” featuring “attack ads” sponsored by
Americans for Prosperity. In other words, it’s a negative ad from
an “outside group” criticizing negative ads from another “outside
group.” Apparently the First Amendment protects that sort of
headache-inducing irony.

Even if it were true that lifting restrictions on speech has
given “an increasingly negative sheen to the general political
discourse,” would that necessarily be a bad thing? In my
experience, “negative” messages tend to be more substantive than
anodyne ads assuring us of a candidate’s compassion, competence, or
patriotism.

No doubt this story, like much New York
Times
 coverage of campaign finance issues, will strike
many readers as fair—provided they agree that less speech is
better than more speech, that speech by insiders is better than
speech by outsiders, and that positive speech is better than
negative speech. But a more evenhanded aproach would treat these as
controversial propositions instead of background assumptions.