A Hazy Kind of Clarity
A while back, I wrote a piece detailing the recent history of blogging and federal election laws. The short version is that, in September 2004, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly's produced a decision that implied that Internet postings could constitute political speech and should therefore be the subject of FEC regulation.
Well, we're nearing that point, as this article shows. The Federal Election Commission has produced some draft regulations which, I should say, I don't find to be that intrusive. Here, the argument seems to center around tracking financial connections between campaigns and bloggers, rather than looking for the kind of nebulous "coordination" that has bedeviled bloggers in the past. In short: if you take money from a campaign to write a piece in your blog, you have to post a disclaimer to that effect.
This is not as scary as it could have been, and is well in line with other industries--in the financial-services field, for example, an analyst hawking a stock needs to make public any financial stake he/she has in that stock. Well, we'll see how this goes down--after all, there are plenty of people on no one's payroll who will be happy to spout an uncritical party line. Then, I'm afraid, we'll see the specter of "coordination" pop up again.
To show what kind of non-compensated coordination is possible, consider for a moment this hagiography (I know he's not dead yet, but what better word is there?) of Bernie Sanders produced and distrubuted by the AP.
Well, we're nearing that point, as this article shows. The Federal Election Commission has produced some draft regulations which, I should say, I don't find to be that intrusive. Here, the argument seems to center around tracking financial connections between campaigns and bloggers, rather than looking for the kind of nebulous "coordination" that has bedeviled bloggers in the past. In short: if you take money from a campaign to write a piece in your blog, you have to post a disclaimer to that effect.
This is not as scary as it could have been, and is well in line with other industries--in the financial-services field, for example, an analyst hawking a stock needs to make public any financial stake he/she has in that stock. Well, we'll see how this goes down--after all, there are plenty of people on no one's payroll who will be happy to spout an uncritical party line. Then, I'm afraid, we'll see the specter of "coordination" pop up again.
To show what kind of non-compensated coordination is possible, consider for a moment this hagiography (I know he's not dead yet, but what better word is there?) of Bernie Sanders produced and distrubuted by the AP.
posted by Jeff at 2:44 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home