Today at 2 pm. in Capitol Room 325, the state House Committee on the Judiciary (JUD) will be hearing testimony on important campaign finance bills.

HB 2376 – TRANSPARENCY FOR INDEPENDENT EXPENDITURES -  This bill will change campaign reporting requirements by:

• Requiring more “persons” to report their campaign spending
• Improving the reporting by noncandidate committees (PACs and SuperPACs)
• Adding late expenditure reports to shine light on money spent just before an election
• Improving the disclosures at the end of campaign advertisements

Please support Media Council Hawaii with a testimony to help PASS this bill. The unlimited corporate spending in campaigns, from independent expenditures and Super PACs is a big issue in this year’s elections.  In a post last week, we highlighted how SuperPAC funding will affect broadcast media.

Also on the Agenda:

• HB 2700 - Improvements for Publicly Funded Elections - replace the equalizing funds for A pilot program for publicly-funded “clean elections” was successfully launched in Hawaii County Council in 2010.
•  HB 2174  is a less comprehensive bill than HB 2376 but concerns similar issues as well.
• HB 2457 – Gifts to legislators & state employees –  This bill allows legislators and state employees to accept charitable event tickets from 501c3 nonprofits, creating new loopholes to our gifts and ethics laws.

Be heard! Submit your testimony online or by email. 

Tim Karr, Senior Strategy Director at FreePress, published a comprehensive report yesterday on campaign Ad spending entitled Citizens Inundated. In it, Karr features current projections for campaign spending and the over-sized influence this money is having on the Federal Communications Commission and local media outlets, particularly on television. His findings and recommendations are issues that, we at the Media Council feel, are worth sharing and applying here in Hawaii.

From the report,

Broadcast television is our most influential communications medium. According to a Pew Research Center survey, 78 percent of American viewers report getting their news from local TV on a typical day — more than the number that rely on newspapers, radio or the Internet. As such TV has been extremely popular with those seeking to manipulate public opinion.

Projections have estimated close to $3 billion in SuperPac spending for the 2012 election cycle. The Wall Street Journal is tracking the spending here. At the time of this post, it’s already at $40,890,383. According to their breakdown, most of the money is in the Republican camp. Locally, GOP candidate and former Hawaii Gov., Linda Lingle’s campaign for a Senate seat has collected $1.8 million in just three months. It may have voters curious if the candidates are (like garage rockers, JEFF the brotherhood) asking themselves, “just how much money can we spend?” Most of this money is expected to end up in the media.

It’s no exaggeration to say that election money is all about the
media. And the funds are not limited to spending by Super
PACs. Campaigns spend, too. For every dollar contributed to
support Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential run, his campaign
spent nearly 60 cents on media, according to the Center for
Responsive Politics.

Yet for all this money pouring into media outlets, journalism jobs are still being lost by competent reporters, photographers and editors. Where the revenue is ending up, is ultimately an issue of transparency. The designation of the public inspection file has previously held this position to document the political Ad buys for broadcast stations. However as Karr, and Columbia’s Steven Waldman have chronicled, the pen-and-ink log is an antiquated model. A recent push to require this information to uploaded online has sparked a backlash from the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) – to the confusion of many. Waldman wrote yesterday,

One gets the strong sense that broadcasters are happy to have a “public inspection file” as long as the public is not actually inspecting it. For instance, four TV licensees (in San Diego, Texas, New Mexico, and Illinois) objected to a proposal that the public be notified on air about the existence of the file. “Such announcements may arouse the public’s interest in examining a PIF, but the Licensees do not believe that the Commission should attempt to stimulate such examinations.” Right. We wouldn’t want the public so “aroused” that they would, in their words, play “Sherlock Holmes” rather than engaging station managers in “productive dialogue.”

In the closing of his report, Karr offers four recommendations to readers, of which Media Council Hawaii is taking part:

• Make Political Ad Spending Information Fully Available Online
• Expose the Money Behind Front Groups in the Body of the Ads
• Get Serious about Strategies to Foster Local Political Journalism
• Strengthen Limits to Consolidated Broadcast Ownership

Entitled, “Keeping a Clean Shop in the Marketplace of Ideas: A Discussion of Journalistic Ethics,” Civil Beat Editor John Temple and The Star-Advertiser’s Mike Gordon will also participate in the panel moderated by Hawaii Public Radio‘s Executive Talk Show Producer, Beth-Ann Kozlovich.

The discussion will be open to the public. Tickets $10, free to students with ID. Seating is limited. Call 955-8821 for reservations.

Neal Conan has served as NPR’s Bureau Chief in New York and London, executive producer of All Things Considered. He is coming to Hawaii on tour with a multi-media program called “First Person: Seeing America.” For more details go to HPR’s website.

Thomas Henson, owner of Charlotte-based American Spirit Media is, also owns WXTX in Columbus, WSFX in Wilmington, WUPV in Richmond and KYOU in Ottumwa, IA., according to Merrill Knox at MediaBistro.com. Within the Toledo market, Henson “operates at least three other TV stations with Raycom Media, which is the parent company of WTOL-TV, Channel 11,” reported Turner. In Hawaii, Raycom Media currently owns CBS (KGMB) and the NBC (KHNL), and operates KFVE under a shared services agreement.

Later in the report, Stephen Lacy, an associate dean of graduate studies within the College of Communication Arts and Sciences at Michigan State University, is quoted. Lacy said the following of television mergers:

“When you go from having two independent newsrooms to one or one and a half, you lose reporters,” he said, adding that those losses impact the number and quality of stories told within a community.

“I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge “facts” that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.”

Craig Silverman’s post at Poynter describes the response by journalists as ‘incredulous’ from a collection of tweets come through his stream today. NYU Media Professor Jay Rosen said, “Everyone in my feed now saying, “Huh? Calling out falsehoods is a reporters JOB!” hasn’t quite grasped how deep the View from Nowhere runs.” Rosen also wrote more extended thoughts at his Press Think blog.

Vanity Fair’s Julie Weiner took a different approach from most criticism and parodied Brisbane with, “Should Vanity Fair Be a Spelling Vigilante?“ For more commentary on this issue, check out Mediagazer’s aggregated discussion.

Updated: Brisbane responds to his critics, and NYT boss Jill Abramson.

Click the image for the campaign link

“If you flip on your local television station and watch for an hour or so, you’re likely to see at least one: a political ad that attacks a candidate for public office. If you live in a ‘battleground state,’ you’ll see as many as 12 political ads an hour,” wrote FreePress‘s Senior Director of Strategy, Tim Karr in an email.

“Iowa just experienced this on-air onslaught of misinformation, offering the rest of us a preview of what television viewing will be like across the nation as Election Day 2012 nears. While we may not be able to stop this barrage of ads, Free Press has a plan to expose their funders,” he added. Currently, broadcasters are required to upkeep “public inspection files” that contain information about political advertising for public examination. The files should contain names of groups that purchase political advertising time and costs involved.

According to Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group, media companies are expected to see more than $3 billion in revenues in 2012 from political advertising. Yesterday in the Hawaii, Civil Beat ran this editorial , citing recent poll findings “that the state’s registered voters believe the wealthy — whether corporations, labor unions or individuals — have an outsized impact on elections and the decisions of members of Congress.”

To determine how large of an impact private wealth will have on the 2012 elections in Hawaii, examining the public file of the state’s broadcasters is a good place to start. Look for a local effort by MCH to hold broadcasters accountable for their public files during this election cycle.

Updated: Check out On the Media this week for more discussion on a new FCC proposal to put the public files online. Transcripts for the shows are available at their site Monday.

• Internet Access is Not a Human Right - Vinton G. Cerf, New York Times
• Is Internet Access a Fundamental Human Right? - Mathew Ingram, GigaOm.com
• Nick Denton, Relentless Seeker of Online Traffic, Turns Sentimental About Writing – David Carr, New York Times
• What the Internet Means for How We Think About the World – Rebecca J. Rosen, The Atlantic
• What Journalists Need to Know About SOPA – Tracie Powell, Poynter
• How the US Pressured Spain to Adopt Unpopular Web Blocking Law - Nate Anderson, Ars Technica

Whether the reporting and commentary by Hawaii’s news media is properly reaching and informing the public

I’ve been asked by the organizers of this event to choose one word that sums up my presentation. In the spirit of NewsMorphosis, my word is: Monopo-Awfulus!

Awful monopoly forces are at work in our community!

Concentration of ownership and control over our news media has resulted in massive layoffs, with fewer people to collect, analyze, and distribute information. We have also lost independent editorial perspectives with the closing of one TV newsroom, by Raycom Media, and the simulcast of Hawaii News Now, and the closing of one print news room with the merger of the Star-Bulletin and Honolulu Advertiser, resulting in the Star-Advertiser. In sort, less is less!

Democracy needs an informed public!

Democracy requires that people vote, and to vote they need to be informed. Since we have a diverse society, we are better served by diversity of viewpoints. With the shuttering of 2 major newsrooms, we lose diversity of opinion.

We are also concerned about the partnership between the monopoly newspaper and the monopoly broadcaster because this could lead to further loss of editorial independence and further homogenization of information. Since broadcast television is still the public’s primary source of news, I will focus the rest of my 5 minutes on television news.

The Media Council Hawaii (MCH) and its allies are challenging the takeover of TV stations KHNL, KGMB, and KFVE by Raycom Media of Alabama. We are fighting to save a scarce public resource, one that is vital to our democracy and the means of acquiring information.

I’m referring to the publicly owned airwaves, the electromagnetic spectrum, which is the way by which all telecommunications operate. We say that the Shared Services Agreement that has resulted in Hawaii News Now violates FCC ownership rules that were designed to promote diversity, competition, and localism. We were told that the SSA was necessitated by economic factors and that the combined news room would better serve the public.

However, an independent study by the University of Delaware (Professor Yanich) and filed with the FCC’s Quadrennial Review Docket, says otherwise. It concludes that:

• The SSA has led to reduction of the quality of local news. For example, the number of stories devoted to public issues dropped significantly post-SSA for stations involved in the agreement and the median length of stories covering public issues fell.
• The stories in which a news crew actually goes to the scene of the story to both shoot video and investigate to create a package presentation has been cut in half by the SSA stations in favor of an anchor voice over video from the scene.
• Because of the trend, stories are shorter and less extensive. The “hypothetical” benefit that the SSA would provide more enterprising news content has not materialized.
• The simulcast of news is itself a problem in that one editorial voice and one independent news room has been lost.
• The study also tends to support the idea that the SSA has had negative impacts on other broadcast television news, as other stations copied many aspects of the Hawaii News Now approach.

There is also an FCC study that shows that non-local broadcast ownership produces far less local news than locally owned stations.

None of this should be taken as individual criticism of local journalists. Many of those remaining continue to perform with distinction. There is a proven link, however, between forms of ownership and the production of quality news and information that are required by a democracy. Look at the Murdoch monopoly model as it was recently revealed in the News Corp, phone-hacking scandal.

We have other options today to acquire information.

Besides print and broadcast media, we have cable (in Hawaii controlled by the Time Warner monopoly) and the Internet, with its many facets: online news, search engines, blogs, social network sites, data bases, and the like.

So while we continue to fight forces of Awful Monopoly, we celebrate the great developments in online news, such as Civil Beat, the Hawaii Independent, and new initiatives by the Hawaii Reporter. Other good sources of information are provided by Hawaii Public Radio and PBS Hawaii. There is also great potential for Community Television. While all these are promising, their combined reach does not equal that of news sources under monopoly control.

So here is an option: in 2014/2015, broadcast licenses in our market wil be up for renewal and challenge, and this opens the possibility of community take-back of broadcast news.

In fact, MCH is exploring the concept of a community owned commercial license, using the concept developed by Green Bay Wisconsin whereby funds were raised by sale of shares to the community to permit purchase of the Green Bay Packers!

Make no mistake – Monopo-Awfulness is not supportive of democracy.

We must continue our work to restore diversity, localism and competition in our sources of news and opinion. Our democracy depends on it!

FAIR concisely sums up the deficits in the reporting of this issue over the last month, or so:

There are specific patterns in corporate media coverage of political debates: Progressive ideas are generally marginalized. “Compromise” between the major parties is encouraged. Democrats should “move to the center,” which in practical terms actually means moving to the right.

All of these tendencies have driven the discussion over the federal debt and the debt ceiling.

It doesn’t get any more true than that. Even prior to the debt ceiling debate, the Progressive Budget was largely ignored, both by government leaders and by corporate media, with few exceptions. Instead, the “Ryan Plan” received significant coverage.

I’d urge you all to read FAIR’s report, but here are the “five areas where media mangled the debt discussion.”

~ Why Is the Debt Ceiling Being Raised?
~ ‘Balance’ Bias
~ Debate Way Off to the Right
~ Finding the ‘Center’
~ Were There Budget Alternatives?