Apr. 2, 2002
Limits on TV Charges Cut from Reform Bill
By J. Barlow Herget
RALEIGH - President George Bush signed the campaign finance reform bill into law last week. The new law takes effect the day after this year’s November election. A piece of the original Senate bill, however, was missing.
If you’re like most people (including me and I’ve run for office) you don’t know about television charges for political ads, and you’re not likely to hear much about it on your local television stations. The missing piece had to do with TV rates and political advertising.
It was a straightforward, simple proposal, named after its sponsor, Sen. Robert Torricelli, D-NJ. It limited television stations from charging politicians more than their "lowest unit charge" for political advertising.
If the lowest ad rate, for instance, is $1,500 for a 30-second spot in prime time, the station must offer that price to you, the candidate. Here’s the hitch. Some other advertiser can come along and pay the station more money for that same time slot. (Rates are charged in "tiers", from the lowest unit charge up to the premium rate.) The station can "bump" you and sell the space to the other guy unless you come back and buy at the next tier. The chances of you getting bumped are about 80 percent when you buy the lowest unit charge.
Candidates can pay a premium at the outset and get the time and space they want. The result is that since 1990 the amount of money spent on political ads has about tripled, according to "The Political Standard" which is published by the Washington non-profit Alliance for Better Campaigns.
Television advertising has become the largest expenditure for political campaigns, and the price keeps going up. Ferrel Guillory, director of the Program in Southern politics, media and public life at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, has just published an article on TV expenditures in the 2000 governor’s race. He found that Gov. Mike Easley spent 74 percent of his money on radio and TV. His opponent, former Charlotte Mayor Richard Vinroot, spent 62 percent on broadcast spots.
"Almost all of the money was spent on TV," says Guillory. What is more troubling to him is that TV news coverage of politics, with a few exceptions, has declined.
Former U.S. Sen. Robert Morgan, chairman of the North Carolina Center for Voter Education, agrees.
"As late as 1980, when I ran for the Senate, if candidates had press conferences, there were always several stations there. TV news does not cover candidates any more." A study of two major Washington television stations’ coverage of the 2001 governor’s election in Virginia supports Morgan’s and Guillory’s observations.
The Alliance for Better Campaigns found that the ABC and CBS affiliates broadcast 42 news stories combined during the final month of the election. The CBS stories averaged 41 seconds and the ABC stories, 10 seconds. Ten seconds! By contrast, the ABC affiliate aired 188 political ads; the CBS affiliate, 220 spots, which amounts to 408 seconds a day if the ads were all 30-second spots.
The Political Standard in a March 2001 edition reported after a study of 10 major TV markets across the nation, "local TV stations systematically gouged candidates, parties and issue groups in the 2000 campaign, jacking up their ad rates in response to the unprecedented demand for political ad time." One station in Columbus, OH, charged candidates on average 148 percent more than their lowest unit charge. The Los Angeles station was lowest at only 2 percent. The Torricelli amendment would have stopped that.
One North Carolina broadcaster, Capitol Broadcasting Co.’s Jim Goodmon of Raleigh believes TV should spend more air time informing the public about political candidates. He backed up his words in the 2000 Election and offered gubernatorial and attorney general candidates almost six minutes of free air time during news broadcasts in the days before the primary and general elections.
Goodmon is the exception. Guillory’s UNC-CH program participated in a national survey in 2000 that found very few stations spent at least five minutes on political news in the 30 days before the election.
"Television ads increase the costs that candidates have to spend and that just means they have to raise more money," says Morgan. He also knows what happened to the Torricelli amendment.
"The broadcasters’ lobby is very effective," he says. "Every politician does not want to offend local broadcasters." The amendment was voted out of the House version, 327-101, and it was the House (Shays-Meehan) version that ultimately was approved by the Senate and went to President Bush without going to a conference committee. Rep. Gene Green, D-TX, offered the motion to kill the Torricelli amendment, and Green, by the way, has received $16,000 in contributions from the broadcasters since 1999.
As Morgan said, the broadcasters have a very effective lobby. And don’t expect television news to spend much time looking for that missing piece.
Barlow Herget is a writer, businessman and former member of the Raleigh City Council.
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