Monday, January 12, 2015
FEC oversight of blogs (with regard to campaign finance) might come up again, after ten years of peace
The Washington Times has an op-ed by Jenny Beth Martin
and Matt Kibbe warning that Ann Ravel, the new chairman of the Federal Election
Commission, will try to get rules changes from the FCC (less likely from a GOP
Congress) allowing the FEC to regulate “free content” on the Internet,
including blogs like this one, that could be construed as political
advocacy. The link is here. The title is "The FEC's Internet Gag Rule: Liberals don't want Americans speaking truth to power". Indeed, sometimes they don't.
Some of this is a reaction to recent Supreme Court
rulings protecting paid political advertising as normal free speech. Much
political advertising is nominally paid for, but “almost free” because it
carries ads and generally does not try to earn significant revenue, except
incidentally. That is true of this one.
The FEC decided it could keep a hands-off attitude in
2006, after considerable flak earlier over whether blogs and op-eds were really
“political campaign materials”, since a 2002 court ruling had left open that
interpretation of McCain-Feingold. I
have explained this on Wordpress here in February 2014, link. Of course, whether "amateur blogs" and the "press" (or the French Fourth Estate) are legally the same also comes up into play, as noted Saturday.
I’ve explained elsewhere a major incident at West
Potomac High School in October 2005 involving me as a substitute teacher, in an
improbable but coincidental chain of occurrences in response to a Washington
Post article on October 11, 2005 here (“Cyber Loophole”) and a now notorious editorial in the Washington Times Oct.
12 “Suffocating the First Amendment” here which implied that a blog like mine could not
be maintained without expensive legal gatekeeping. The rest of the story s here on this blog
July 27, 2007 and it sounds like a movie plot for a courtroom thriller (and,
yes, I am working on a screenplay based on this.) What happened behind the scenes is a "mystery" and I don't think we've heard the last of this even today.
Let’s see if this FEC Beast has really surfaced
again. I know from some underground
scuttlebutt that stuff happened there after this controversy ten years ago.
History repeats itself. As a "conservative" newspaper, TWT loves to see that.
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