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Unmasking the Super PACs
http://inthesetimes.com/article/12953/unmasking_the_super_pacsIt’s election season in Anytown, U.S.A., and the incumbent County Dogcatcher faces some fierce competition. An issue ad from a Super PAC called Puppy Love has voters convinced the incumbent kills dogs for sport. A muckraking reporter trying to impress her editor walks into the local TV station and asks to see its political file, which offers information about who is paying for the station’s political ads, including the one Puppy Love produced.
She learns that on Puppy Love’s board of directors sits one Cruella de Vil. The reporter let’s the town know all about this Super PAC propagandist trying to influence their dog catching vote. The truth is out there. Unmasked, Cruella has to come up with new wicked ways to trick voters. She will likely do just that, but in the meantime, her tricks got treated.
Candidates and Super PACs will spend more than $3 billion on political advertisements before the November this election cycle. The broadcast media do not want reporters to access information about those ads online–and they’ve come up with some pretty lame excuses as to why.
In the daily grind of a political reporter covering an election, following the money is usually dependent on two things. Either the reporter gets lucky enough to know someone in tight with Cruella’s bumbling idiot sidekicks and is told by an off-record source who is behind the attack ads, or the reporter walks into the TV station that’s running them and asks to go through a file cabinet full of ad info. If that sounds so pre-Netscape 1994, it’s because it is.