The Center for Competitive Politics generally sticks with defending what we call the First Amendment political rights of speech, assembly, and petition, which means we rarely touch on the other two First Amendment rights, press and religion. Occasionally when politics intersects with these rights, such as regarding political endorsements by newspapers or religious leaders, we may comment but generally these other rights just fall outside our main areas of work.
That said, the recent troubles of the newspaper industry do bring an interesting parallel to mind, that regarding the importance of money in politics and whether "money is speech."
Advocates of so-called campaign finance "reform" insist that "money isn’t speech," an argument they must make if they are to have any hope at all of not running up against the First Amendment’s prohibition of speech limits.
As I like to point out to people, money isn’t speech, but money also isn’t a free press. But just try to run the New York Times or any other newspaper without money and see how long it lasts, I tell people. I always assumed I was making a rhetorical point or even a somewhat absurd, take-the-logic-to-its-furthest-extreme argument in order to illustrate how important money was to enable free speech. Little did I know that the economic downturn would prove the point for me.
The recent closings of the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post -Intelligencer, along with the threatened shuttering of the Boston Globe and the financial difficulties of the newspaper industry in general, provide vivid examples of what, exactly, money means to the existence of a free press. Because that is exactly what is killing these newspapers, a lack of revenue.
There is much handwringing in certain quarters about the downward spiral of print newspapers, and some of that concern touches on the First Amendment implications of a declining newspaper industry and their ability to serve as a "watchdog" on government.
One solution being offered is the conversion of theoretically-for-profit newspapers into intentionally-non-profit newspapers, and Senator Benjamin Cardin of Maryland has in fact proposed just such a bill. I have no insight into whether the non-profit model solves the revenue problems that many newspapers face, or is particularly good or bad public policy. Many fine publications exist today (National Review and The Nation come to mind) that exist on the non-profit model, and seem to do an excellent job of reporting on important issues, which means it is certainly possible that converting to a non-profit status may be a good way for the print newspaper business to go.
But I wonder, now that we’re seeing just how important money is to the press, whether any "reformers" or members of the public in general will draw the obvious and appropriate conclusion regarding money in politics?