Public Please

I called the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) requesting that the FCC commissioners issue a public statement against ABC’s exclusion of presidential candidate Rep. Dennis Kucinich. I asked them to say in their own words that it would be in the public interest for broadcasters to include all of the presidential candidates in the debate.

Specifically, I called the office of Commissioner Copps at 202-418-2000. A lady at Copp’s office told me someone would call me back. I waited several days. No one called me back. So I called Commissioner Copp’s office back. This time the lady said that for political and legal reasons Commissioner Copps could not issue a statement. I asked why. She told me that she could not answer. She redirected me to the Media Bureau of the FCC. I got the voicemail of a lady named Hope.

Later that day, Hope called me back. She told me that she works for the Political Programming section of the Policy division in Media Bureau of the FCC. I asked Hope why the FCC would not issue a public statement which mandates equal opportunity for all of the candidates to speak in a televised presidential debate.

Hope told me that she could not answer the question about why Commissioner Copps chose not to issue a public statement. I asked her if she knew of any rule or regulation that would prevent the FCC commissioners from issuing such statements. She said she did not know of any such rule or regulation, but that FCC as a matter of policy does not tell broadcasters what they should air and that this would violate the freedom of speech of those broadcasters. I asked her if the FCC would tell broadcasters to issue emergency information if they had reason to believe that they would not issue that information. She said that she did not know because she is not an expert in that area.

However, Hope did say that the FCC will respond to violations of its rules and regulations, but will not preempt such violations with warnings before the violations take place. I don’t know if this is true or not, but it seems strange that the FCC as a regulatory body would not issue warnings or advisories to broadcasters.

Hope continued by saying that the FCC does have provisions for equal opportunity access for political candidates on certain broadcasts. Hope took the time to introduce me to these rules and told me that I could learn more by reviewing the FCC’s Political Programming page. While I have not yet fully digested the complexities of these rules and regulations, I was able to learn about several exclusions to them and the main reason why the FCC accepts the systematic exclusion of Dennis Kucinich and others from the televised presidential debates.

In a nutshell, the FCC requires that broadcasters provide competing political candidates an opportunity to purchase comparable airtime for political advertising at the minimum market price if they request it within a certain time frame. This is the main protection the FCC provides to political candidates.

However, according to Hope, this measure to protect equal political opportunity, does not apply to political debates. So the FCC does NOT protect equal opportunity of political speech in the televised presidential debates. Instead, the FCC accepts the political censorship of presidential candidate Kucinich and others in the televised presidential debates. The FCC accepts the way corporations like the Des Moines Register in Iowa, ABC News in New Hampshire, and MSNBC in Nevada exclude presidential candidates from their debates because those corporations - and not the public - own the formats of those debates. I asked Hope if the FCC had any rationale for why they embraced such political censorship.

Hope explained that the FCC made the exclusion because it would be impractical to require broadcasters to include all potential political candidates - that there simply are too many people who could run for office. I told her that this does not seem like a good reason to make an exception for debates because the Problem of Many Political Candidates also obtains for political advertising, but that the FCC does not exclude political advertising from equal opportunity protections.

It seems like presidential debates deserve at least the same protections as political advertising. In political advertising, the broadcaster must find a way to provide equal air time to all of the candidates. Why is this problem of dividing air time any different for political debates? Both political advertising and political debates have to chop up time blocks to broadcast their messages.

The FCC could apply the same rules to political debates as they do for political advertising without any conceptual or material contradiction because political debates are a form of political advertising. The candidates take turns speaking. What distinguishes political debates from other forms of political advertising, and is there any special reason to exclude political debates from the regulations which govern other forms of political advertising?

Perhaps the main distinction is the granularity of air time. Presidential debates often divide the air time with respect to each candidate into smaller time slots than other forms of televised political advertising, such as political commercials. But this distinction is suspect because the time slots are also often approximately the same duration.

Perhaps the main distinction is the responsiveness of the political messages. Unlike political commercials, political debates often provide more direct responses to the messages of their opponents; their messages are not situated between other television programs, but are lined up sequentially in a single program with a more direct back-and-forth dialogue. But this distinction does not contribute to the Problem of Many Candidates; it actually identifies a Benefit of Many Candidates.

Some might object and say that we can only fit a certain number of candidates on the stage at once, and that we cannot broker a fair exchange of discourse between thousands of potential political candidates. Although it may seem daunting, we can reduce the number of political candidates by imposing a small monetary fee for participation in the debates. But even with a large number of candidates, it is technologically possible to devise a fair debate algorithm, one which grants all candidates equal air time laying out their own ideas and responding to the criticism of their competitors. As the YouTube debate showed us, we can host and broadcast debates virtually, and the digital medium of networked video is relatively easy to divide and coordinate.

So there is no good reason for the FCC to accept political censorship in political debates. The FCC has no good reason to condone the way the television networks are excluding the political advertising of Dennis Kucinich and others from the 2008 U.S. presidential debates. The political debates are a form of political advertising and as such the regulations of the FCC that grant an exclusion do not make any sense.

Finally, I asked Hope if the FCC had set aside any public broadcast channels - internet or otherwise - dedicated to the equal opportunity of communication from political candidates who are running for elections, candidates who may not have the money to pay for expensive political advertising. Hope said no, but there is still hope.