Chapter 14 Governance and Mass Media Television Ads and Elections To run for the U S Senate the queen of World Wrestling s Smackdown Linda McMahon needed to reinvent herself she put 50 million into her Senate campaign She had put herself both in the ring and into a bitchy role in ringside antics beginning in 1999 She had also acquired a reputation for business acumen shifting wrestling from the fa ade of being a sport into a make believe escapist fantasy with tawdry soap opera story lines o Then McMahon engineered an exorcism of the sleaze to expand WWE s audience to kids went from PG 14 to PG Still when McMahon decided to run for the U S Senate from Connecticut many people couldn t rid the Smackdown images from their minds o Could 50 million mostly to buy advertising time on television overcome McMahon s earlier lowbrow television person Apparently not She lost But she sure spent lots of money in trying For the 2012 presidential campaigns the Democratic and Republican parties each were budgeting as much as 1 billion a record o The question Can elections be bought with lots of expensive television ads o The lesson Money alone cannot win an election But neither can a successful campaign be waged without money to place television ads Historically the connection of politics and mass media was mostly limited to editorial endorsements o Every presidential candidate since Abraham Lincoln coveted an editorial endorsement from the influential New York Times even while receiving neutral and dispassionate campaign coverage in the paper s news section The only financial linkage between media and candidates was campaign checks written to newspaper and broadcast companies for ad space and time It was a business model that assured audiences that the news could be trusted as impartial and not bought A dynamic for change may have been signaled when News Corporation the media empire whose properties include Fox News began channeling money into politics o Such blatant cracks in the old brick wall built between newsrooms and politics and also between news corporations and politics were unprecedented It could be concluded that mass media corporations may be coming to see themselves as just another special interest akin to the petroleum banking and health industries that donate to buy the ears of candidates and keep them beholden once elected In Connecticut Linda McMahon was able to argue that she was not beholden to contributors The 50 million she budgeted for her Senate campaign was entirely her own money o That raised another question Should public office be limited only to those rich enough to buy enough television time to be elected Chapter Insights A major role for media in democracy was encapsulated in the term Fourth Estate introduced by British statesman Edmund Burke in 1787 Media influence governance by setting the agenda for political discussion Strategies for U S government manipulation of mass media are as old as the Republic itself Partisanship plays a role in mass media coverage of U S political campaigns Corporate spending enables television to play a pivotal role in U S political campaigns Media Role in Governance The news media are sometimes called the fourth estate or the fourth branch of government These terms identify the independent role of the media in reporting on the government The media are a kind of watchdog on behalf of the citizens Fourth Estate Medieval English and French societies were highly structured into classes of people called estates First estate clergy second nobility third common people After Gutenberg the mass produced written word began emerging as a player in the power structure but it couldn t be pigeonholed as part of one or another of the three estates o Fourth Estate The press as a player in medieval power structures in addition to the clerical noble and common estates o Edmund Burke British member of Parliament who is sometimes credited with coining the term Fourth Estate The fourth estate concept underwent an adaptation when the United States was created The constitution set up a balanced form of government with three branches the legislative the executive and the judicial The republic s founders implied a role for press in the new governance structure when they declared in the Constitution s First Amendment that the government should not interfere with the press Fourth Branch The press as an informally structured check on the legislative executive and judicial branches of U S government o It s job is to monitor the other branches as an external check on behalf of the people o Watchdog Role Concept of the press as a skeptical and critical monitor of government Government Media Relations Although the First Amendment says that the government shouldn t place restrictions on the press the reality is that exceptions have evolved Broadcast Regulation Congress tried to ensure even handedness in political content through the equal time rule Equal Time Rule Government requirement for stations to offer competing political candidates the same time period and the same rate for advertising o Fairness Doctrine Former government requirement that stations air all sides of public issues 1949 1987 Abandoned in the belief that a growing number of stations made possible by improved technology meant the public could find plenty of diverse views The commission in effect acknowledged that the marketplace could be an effective force for fairness without further need for a government requirement Abandonment of the fairness doctrine was part of the general movement to ease government regulation on business o This shift has eased First Amendment difficulties inherent in the federal regulation of broadcasting o Even so the FCC remains firmly against imbalanced political broadcasting Don Burden Radio station owner who lost licenses because he favored some political candidates over others He had instructed the news staff to run only favorable stories on one U S Senate candidate and only negative stories on the other Although the Burden case is almost a quarter century old the FCC has sent no signals that it has modified its position on blatant slanting o o Print Regulation o Tornillo Opinion The U S Supreme Court upheld First Amendment protection for the print media even if they are imbalanced and unfair The issue was whether the FCC s fairness doctrine could apply to the print media and the Supreme Court said no As the court sees it the First Amendment applies more directly to