Digital Citizen 2012

Originally published at PBSMediaShift 10/3/11

In 2012, two tidal waves will reconfigure the American electoral system and the news media that cover it. A tsunami made of money will buoy up the structure of entrenched political power, while a huge wave of personal technology will disrupt it.

I can predict both of these events with certainty because they've happened every election year over the last couple of decades. Still, the changes in 2012 may be dramatic. Angry citizens around the world have been using a potent combination of mobile phones, social networking and broadcast television to upend established political orders. Now it's Americans who are angry, and this election could spark a new level of activism leveraged by these same tools. At the same time, this will be the first general election since the so-called "Citizens United" Supreme Court decision, which tossed out the last vestiges of regulations limiting campaign financing. Among other effects, this will translate into a record numbers of attack ads next fall. Taken together, these two changes may profoundly affect our democracy, and they deserve a closer look.

Bad News for News

In June of this year, Hollywoodreporter.com headlined, "Moody's Predicts Record Political Ad Spending for TV Station Groups in 2012." In one breathless run-on sentence, the article explained: "Broadcasters benefited from a Jan. 2010 Supreme Court decision [known as Citizens United] that effectively ended spending caps for political ads, so, unlike in 2004 and 2008, the presidential election next year will happen without limits on campaign spending by corporations or unions."

There has not been much in the way of analysis of how the astronomical levels of campaign cash will affect the news ecosystem. Because the new funds will enrich local TV stations, one could argue that this has nothing to do with news reporting. Perhaps all local TV boats will rise with the tide, including the news dinghy.

But the relationship may be more complex than that, and there have been intriguing signs and portents in recent years: Sarah Palin is famous for advising a beleaguered Tea Party candidate to speak only to Fox News, and other candidates are increasingly avoiding interviews. Both reporters and citizens have relied on Town Hall meetings as moments where unscripted hints can surface, but ever since the disastrous Town Hall meetings in the summer of 2009, Democrats are increasingly replacing Town Hall meetings with conference calls. Now, candidates of both parties have retreated behind a "conference-call wall," diminishing democracy in the process.

It's not surprising that candidates would rather not speak to troublesome reporters or a querulous public, who are in one sense their natural enemies. But now, with their new wealth, will candidates reject news appearances, as they have Town Hall meetings, using ads as a kind of counter-programming? Will attack ads begin to look like faux news reports in attempts to offset reporting with well-financed propaganda?

"It may take a cycle of awful attack ads to realize that something more needs to be legislated," said Seth Korman, a lawyer and legal writer, who nonetheless cautioned that it's unclear whether "courts will look favorably on new prohibitions on political speech." Korman noted in the Rutgers Law Record that the Citizens United decision "expands the legal definition of the press" by granting rights once reserved for the news media to all corporations. The Supreme Court's thinking, said Korman, is that "everyone should be able to editorialize." But, as he pointed out in a related article in the Huffington Post, non-profits, including non-profit news organizations, remain restricted in their "ability to 'influence legislation' or 'participate' in a political campaign." He asked, "If the bar on free-speech restrictions has been so lowered for some corporations, why must it remain for others?"

Attack of the Attack Ads

One troubling aspect of the coming expansion of attack ads is that, because their content is protected by the First Amendment, they are less regulated than other forms of commercial speech. In 2004, a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth launched a series of attack ads against presidential candidate John Kerry and other Democrats. The Federal Election Commission later fined the group, and its liberal counterpart MoveOn.org, because they "crossed the line with overtly partisan 2004 campaign activities," as the L.A. Times reported in 2006. These groups were not censured for what we might call lying, but for "failing to register as political committees." With the passage of Citizens United, the rules on which that judgment was based no longer apply.

There are regulations that prohibit lying in political ads, but the laws are overseen by an alphabetic welter of federal agencies -- the FEC, the FCC, the FTC -- and by state regulatory agencies. Not surprisingly, regulations often diverge or lag; most agencies are only just beginning to grapple with the Citizens United Decision (see this on the FEC, and bookmark the site Election Law Blog, the best place to track the evolving situation).

The FEC, for one, is staffed by political appointees with conflicting political agendas. Typically, the punishment for lying in political ads is a fine, levied months or years after the election, providing small comfort to the candidate victimized by false statements. For example, in 2009 the creator of an untrue attack ad on the city of Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, aired in 2007 paid the city $2,500 to settle a lawsuit. In June of this year, the North Carolina Republican Party issued a formal apology to a representative who was narrowly defeated for an untrue campaign mailer sent in November 2010.

Following the passage of Citizens United, Radio Broadcasting Report, the online media industry site, ran a long article titled "Broadcaster's Liability After Citizens United." It strived to soothe worried media execs by laying out exactly how the process works when "faced with allegations of libel, slander, fraud or misrepresentation regarding a public figure."

The article explained that the FCC's "standard for broadcaster responsibility for truth or falsity in the context of political matter [is that] each licensee may exercise its own judgment as how best to serve the public interest by presenting contrasting views..." The article advised its readers to "ask the sponsor of the ad for justification. If the response appears reasonable, the Commission and the courts do not require that the broadcaster be the guarantor of its truth."

Back in 2007, Factcheck.org wrote a thorough piece on the legal ramifications for attack ads that stretch the truth, citing a number of examples from the "handful of states" that have laws on the books prohibiting lies in political ads. In two of three cases, the perpetrators were acquitted; in one case, the guilty party "paid no real penalty for the false ad, except for some unfavorable publicity." The article concluded, somewhat ruefully, "All this should tell voters that -- legally -- it's pretty much up to them to sort out who's lying and who's not in a political campaign."

'Truth is the Underdog'

If it's up to the voter to figure out who is lying, then both the electorate and the news reporters they rely on may be spending an awful lot of time in 2012 sorting through the mess. For those hoping that substantive issues will get a fair hearing, this is more bad news. Attack ads are already much covered by news; now they threaten to swallow up increasing portions of the news hole. Reporting on attack ad controversies is cheaper and easier than producing original stories, or attempting to interview recalcitrant candidates. With many mainstream news outlets already weakened by a failing old revenue model and an invasion of partisan reporting masquerading as news, can we expect coverage of attack ads to crowd out issue reporting?

"I advocate class warfare as journalism," said Bob Calo, senior lecturer at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, with his tongue only partly in his cheek. "Journalists are no longer trusted by the public, who think we are just part of the propaganda game. We should be helping the public differentiate between propaganda and facts." Calo, who produced magazine shows at ABC and NBC before joining the Berkeley faculty, said, "A reasonable risk would be to declare your loyalty to the underserved middle class. That means the politicians are your adversary."

He takes the threat of attack ads seriously, if no less acerbically. "Journalists are smart, but the problem is, you are going up against even smarter people who work in public relations. Truth is the underdog in American political speech."

Originally published at PBSMediaShift 11/2/11

This September, I wrote in MediaShift about the unfortunate effects on journalism that the deregulation of campaign financing could have. The article hinted that public media might be able to offset the damage, and maybe even save democracy. This sounds so grandiose that, to explain how and why, we need to back up a few steps -- quite a few, back to 1996.

Fifteen years ago, U.C. Berkeley launched an ambitious, new center meant to "help business and governmental organizations understand the sweeping developments taking place in telecommunications markets." These changes were known as the Digital Convergence. In 1996, the dot-com bubble was just beginning to inflate, large media corporations were snapping up small ones, and Microsoft was three years away from being labeled a monopoly. The NY Times declared that the "convergence of conventional television with the personal computer" would create "a tectonic shift in our information environment." And when the shift arrived in, more or less, 2006, it truly was "tectonic." Television had been assumed to be the big winner of the digital transition, but it grew instead via the personal media track of the Internet and the telephone. So, when the convergence finally arrived, it had been renamed web 2.0.

With web 2.0 now a fact of life for half a decade, the outline of the next round of innovation, the next step in media evolution, is becoming discernable. It may be difficult for some to accept, but the next digital leap belongs to that hulking old one-way medium, that evil relic of corporate mind control, television. And if television is going to unleash a new kind of politics, and a new kind of democracy, it will be public television that manages to do it.

From Audience to Participants

Thanks to the Internet, individuals found new roles at the center of a personal media revolution -- as content creators, gamers, citizen journalists, ranters, panters and bloggers. New companies (and you know their names) sprang up to meet the demand. Today, we understand that these companies do not serve audiences; they serve individuals, participants.

Under the influence of these dazzling changes, TV has also become participatory. Jay Rosen, media critic and journalism professor at NYU, framed it in a different context, explaining that those "formerly known as the audience" are increasingly visible on TV. Reality programs, game shows, court shows, talent shows and the rest, are part and parcel of the participation revolution. It may not always be pretty, but the people are conducting their own media literacy courses, learning how to play themselves on television.

Nonetheless, one barrier has remained: Television is still the crucial platform for news and policy debate, holding extraordinary power over money, attention and what gets discussed. According to a 2009 Pew poll, 71 percent of Americans "get most of their national and international news from television." And yet, a virtual Berlin Wall separates citizens from the pundits and politicians who populate news and current affairs programming, and thus from the powerful role TV plays in shaping policy.

Today, that TV wall is being breached, as potent combinations of mobile phones, social networking and broadcasting upend established political orders in the U.S. and worldwide. In 2009, for example, Town Hall activists posted cell phone videos on YouTube of themselves yelling at their congressmen. Within hours, Fox News enlisted the ranters as interview subjects, pushing their YouTube hits through the roof. In 2010, Tunisians shot mobile videos of nascent protests, which were soon featured on Al Jazeera, sending enraged citizens in both Tunisia and Egypt to activist Twitter and Facebook sites. In one case, we got the Tea Party, in the other the Arab Spring. While much is still mysterious about the intersection of media and political movements, the effect of this multi-platform coordination -- this convergence between personal and mass media -- is a game changer.

But we can't sit back and wait for digital democracy to unfold. The "Occupy Wall Street" movement, which entered the broader American consciousness only when mass media began to cover it, holds some objectives that are similar to those of the Tea Party. This could be the way Americans come together to create real change -- could be, but it won't. With each movement represented by their own cable TV screaming squads at Fox News and MSNBC, they will continue to be portrayed as opposites in order to fulfill the prime imperative -- conflict -- of standard media coverage. What's worse, they will cancel out each other's messages, but still take up a good deal of oxygen that could be used for reasoned analysis as an election draws near. Toss in an onslaught of political TV ads courtesy of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, the weakened state of journalism and the fading of the Town Hall tradition, and what we may be seeing in 2012 is a full-blown crisis of democracy.

Public TV's role

This is where public TV can ride to the rescue. If the Tea Party has Fox and the Occupiers have MSNBC, then everyone else -- those in between, neither of the above, or a bit of both -- need public TV, ubiquitous and highly trusted, to offer the public a platform. We are talking about the majority of Americans, about the issues they want to discuss, and about providing an alternative to the posturing, spin and propaganda that threaten to consume this election.

The ease with which people can post videos and tweets means that as the election approaches, public stations can take a page from St. Louis Public TV, a leader in community participation. Just the other day, the station used Facebook to organize the first of many meetings, asking community members to help "plan election campaign coverage that is most useful to you."

And even more is possible in today's digitally wired world. Our non-profit, Internews Interactive, has been involved for years in projects that let voters connect via personal and social media to election programs, working with Twin Cities Public TV, Link TV and others. Here are a few clips from these programs.

There has been a flurry of connections lately between the two political movements of our time, Tea Party and Occupy. The media narrative of this unprecedented development is only now being written, but what it says could change the course of US politics in this election year.