How Liberal Foundations Gutted the First Amendment, Suckered Congress, the President & the Courts In Order To Make You Shut Up

    by Ken Bell

Many of us believe that when President Bush signed the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA) into law, he was trying to have his cake and eat it , too.

Precisely because he believed and openly expressed the opinion that much of the act’s onerous regime was a blatant violation of the First Amendment freedoms of speech and of the press, he had confidence that he could avoid the unpalatable politics of vetoing the bill—the Supreme Court would declare it unconstitutional. Unfortunately, they did not.

The signing of that bill was one of the most regrettable and damaging acts of the last four years. Since the court’s decision upholding the law and its gag rules in 2003, the BCRA has become another link in the more than 30 year long chain of political campaign “reforms” that have made the American political system ever worse. And now the Federal Election Commission (FEC) is threatening to worsen it further.
As Richard Hasen explained in Personal Democracy Forum earlier this month, “a recent decision by federal district court judge Coleen Kollar-Kotelly (one of the three judges hearing the challenge to the original McCain-Feingold law, and whose position was mostly upheld by the Supreme Court over the alternatives of two judicial colleagues) rejected a host of FEC regulations, including those exempting the Internet from any regulation. No free pass, the judge determined, and she sent the question back to the FEC for new rulemaking.”

As the Wall Street Journal sarcastically editorialized, “the FEC must now decide just how it intends to monitor and penalize all those attempting to corrupt the US political system via modem.”

This might have been less disastrous than at first it appears, if only the Washington Post’s Brian Faler were right in claiming that the FEC is “loath to do anything that would chill free speech.” Unfortunately, the law as written already mandates a blizzard of chills. Faler’s thin apology would be more credible if the mainstream media informonopoly hadn’t long backed restrictions on the free speech of others to protect and preserve the power of its collective role as gatekeeper of the news.

Following a year of damaging exposes by bloggers and other internet upstarts, the informonopolists doubtlessly are pleased at this potentially stifling counterstrike against the barbarians.
Does that sound like hyperbole? Then listen to what a number of informonopolists and their sympathizers had to say about the internet’s revelations regarding CNN’s chief new executive Eason Jordan, who recently resigned in ignominy after making reckless, unsubstantiated and defamatory statements in an international forum about American servicemen targeting and murdering newsmen in Iraq.

Jordan had made similar unsubstantiated charges before. You will recall, of course, that he is the same CNN executive who boldly proclaimed on the pages of the New York Times of April 11, 2003 that CNN had suppressed news of torture and murder by the Hussein regime in Iraq to preserve its “access”—essentially a bald-faced and unapologetic admission that CNN had lied repeatedly to the American people, aiding and abetting a dictator in the preservation of his power. This shocking revelation didn’t even phase the mainstream media: just business as usual.

Nor did Jordan’s defamation seem at all significant to the informonopolists. Steve Lovelady of the Columbia Journalism Review instead condemned the internet bloggers who exposed Jordan as “salivating morons who make up the lynch mob.” Bertrand Pecquerie of World Editors Forum called them “sons of Senator McCarthy” (probably not Eugene) and “scalps hunters.” David Gergen decried “a quality of vigilante justice here which has been excessive.” And on Jay Rosen’s PressThink blog, William Boykin railed that “Jordan has just been tire-necklaced by a bloodthirsty group of utopian, bible-thumping knuckledraggers that believe themselves to be bloggers but are really just a street gang.”

These unhinged, hysterical and demonstrably false ad homiem attacks were given an added edge because nearly the entire corps of mainstream media had been utterly silent about the scandal right up to the moment Jordan resigned. They were no less humiliated than they were when Dan Rather was exposed for slandering the president with fabricated scenarios and fake documents. And they want the riffraff to shut up. How convenient that they campaigned so strenuously for BCRA restrictions on free speech, and won.

How inconvenient that at this very moment of opportunity, the New York Post’s Ryan Sager has broken the story of the massive deception and fakery used to build the “bandwagon” for the passage of the BCRA. As he writes in his March 17th article “Buying ‘Reform’”, “campaign finance reform has been an immense scamperpetrated on the American people by a cadre of left-wing foundations and disguised as a ‘mass movement.’”

Citing evidence from an “astonishing videotape” from a conference held at the University of Southern California last March, Sager charges that the Pew Charitable Trust’s Sean Treglia outlined a detailed campaign for setting up Potemkin “experts” on campaign “reform” across the country and creating “fake business, minority and religious groups” to demand that Congress pass McCain-Feingold speech repression.

Sager further demonstrates that during the decade from 1994 to 2004 almost $140 million was spent on a concerted agitprop campaign, and that “the vast majority of this money—$123 million, 88 percent of the total” was spent by just 8 left-wing foundations, among them George Soros’ Open Society Institute ($12.6 million) and, in first place, Pew Charitable Trusts ($40.1 million). As he declares, these are the same outfits that sponsor “the Earth Action Network, the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund, People for the American Way, Planned Parenthood, the Public Citizen Foundation, the Feminist Majority Foundation . . .”(his ellipses).

These funds were used to set up “a stable of supposedly independent pro-reform groups” such as the Center for Public Integrity and Democracy 21. Incredibly, much of the funding went to the press. In September 2000 the left-wing American Prospect magazine produced a special issue dedicated to campaign finance “reform.” As Sager writes, “with incredible hypocrisy, the magazine failed to tell its readers that the ‘Checkbook Democracy’ issue was paid for with a $132,000 check from the Carnegie Corporation—which, again, has spent $14 million promoting the regulation of political speech in the last decade.” In that same decade, National Public Radio took $1.2 million from these same leftist foundations for its own propaganda in favor of restricting free speech.

In the videotape, Sager reports, Treglia describes how concerned he was when George Wil caught wind of the massive scheme in one of his columns. But, Treglia says, “journalists didn’t care . . . So no one followed up on the story.” A more likely explanation is the informonopolists’ self-interest in preserving and extending their power, and furthering the values they share with the leftist foundations and “think tanks.”

We now know a good deal more than we did about the shameful, disingenuous—and successful—campaign to gut the First Amendment. But it’s important to understand just how much is at stake now that the FEC has threatened to help silence free speech on the internet, or, if you will, now that “the agency is weighing whether—and how—to impose restrictions on a host of online activities, including campaign advertising and politically-oriented blogs,” as the Washington Post phrased it.

Ironically the best proof of just how serious this threat will be comes from the Pew Internet & American Life Project’s report “The Internet and Campaign 2004.” It notes that “the internet was a key force in politics last year as 75 million Americans used it to get news, discuss candidates in emails, and participate directly in the political process.” In 1996, they document, just 4% of the American populace went online to get news or information about the elections. In 2004 that number had grown to 29% of the general public and 52% of all internet users. As the report observed, “the internet has caught up to radio and is closing in on newspapers as a primary political news source among those who go online.”

Even more importantly, the report continues, “some 33% of those who used the internet for political purposes said they did so because they did not get all they wanted from their newspapers and television news. Another 11% said they most liked getting political news on the internet because they can get information on the Web that is not available elsewhere.”

The Cato Institute’s John Samples notes the ominous similarity between the adoption of restrictions on campaign spending for television advertising in 1971 (in the aftermath of the 1968 presidential campaign) and the situation today: “Last year a relatively new technology shook up the political world. The upstart presidential candidate Howard Dean used the Internet to raise unprecedented sums that fueled his outsider campaign for the Democratic nomination. Bloggers brought down Dan Rather of CBS News, a titan of the old media, and offered uncontrolled sources of information and insight to voters.

“In 2005, as in 1969, those who use technology have to expect the status quo they are upending will fight back.

“The upcoming effort to regulate and restrict the Internet thus seems as inevitable as it is unfortunate. Indeed, the effort to clamp down on the Internet will succeed absent resistance.”
Long live the resistance.