While pretty much everyone else in the world sees the Hillary Clinton/"1984" ad as an exuberant expression of free speech and creativity, regardless of your stance in the primaries, DailyKos bête noire Carol Darr of GWU's Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet, on the other hand, sees it as a profound threat to the American way of life:

"Free speech. That simple," said Andrew Rasiej, founder of Personal Democracy Forum of New York, which tracks the confluence of politics and the Internet. "Posting a video is no different than sitting in a coffee shop and voicing your opinion."

Others see dangers.

"When it is not regulated, you can take any amount of money from any source, including foreign entities, and you are not required to disclose it," said Carol Darr of the Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet at George Washington University.

"There are a lot of people around the world who care about who the next president is," she said. "If they can have an effect without leaving fingerprints, it is naive to think they won't."

The horror!  What would we ever do if dirty foreigners tried to take over American media outlets and influence our elections?

In an editorial today tied to the story, the Los Angeles Times gets it so right:

The beauty of the Internet is that speech is free. It costs virtually nothing to create an ad for or against a candidate and post it on YouTube for the world to see, so the exchange of ideas (and insults) is refreshingly brisk. Not long after the Clinton slam caught fire, someone did an anti-Obama version of the same piece. Meanwhile, other clips praising or slamming the candidates proliferate on the website.

The potential for anonymous potshots and dirty tricks online is real and always will be. But the answer isn't more regulation.

The Federal Election Commission already requires those who pay for ads online to disclose their spending, and its rules against contributions by corporations and unions apply equally to the Web as to the airwaves. Those strictures will be buttressed by the blogosphere's penchant for rooting out fakes online. Besides, candidates can always console themselves with the fact that attention spans online are short, and the best way to counteract a message you don't like is to respond with one of your own

(For what it's worth, twenty years ago the FEC confirmed that there's nothing wrong with foreigners providing voluntary assistance to federal campaigns.)

edited to add:  You know who's the real problem?  The Economist.  Not only is it owned by dirty foreigners seeking to write about our elections, but it's anonymous.  The horror, the horror.

Notice how all us blogs are linking to campaign ads and other campaign videos on YouTube? This is what Carol Darr and the other "reformers" at Common Cause, Democracy 21, and other groups like them feared -- that you might get a chance to see what campaigns are putting up on the air.

The public will just see political messages -- e-mailed videos, commentary on blogs or other online publications and in some instances online ads -- without knowing who paid for them.

More dire warnings from the "reformers" if the FEC didn't place heavy regulations on blogs:

Carol Darr of the Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet warned that the so-called media exception would be abused. If the FEC veered in that direction, Darr said, you'd see "the campaign finance laws that we've operated under for 50 years just crumble." Larry Noble of the Center for Responsive Politics added: "I don't think you can just make everybody the press."

For these jokers, only the government could protect the poor unsuspecting souls of this country from the evils of citizen people-powered media.

Yet, we are now entering an era of unprecedented access to campaign information, and not just from races in our own backyards, but all over the country. In Carol Darr's world, people like me shouldn't be able to air any campaign's ad without getting paid for it. In her world, I'm providing an "in-kind contribution" to these campaigns. In her world, campaigns should have to raise more money to air ads on sites like Daily Kos, which would then reduce the need for money in campaigns. See? It makes perfect sense!

Thankfully, the FEC, in a refreshingly responsible decision seven months ago, ruled that blogs could avail themselves of the "media exemption" under campaign rules, meaning we would be treated like other media. And the result? Greater democratic participation. An unprecedented amount of attention and oversight paid to campaigns and candidates. Entire swaths of the country might be tuned out of politics, but those of us who remain engaged now have a wealth of information upon which to base our decisions.

The Carol Darrs of the world will still try to nanny us into submission. They've lost sight of what the democratic process should be about. They are offended at public participation and have done everything in their power to stymie it. They think government is the solution to every ill, and have so little regard for the people that it borders on contempt.

Common Cause, Democracy 21, Carol Darr's Institute of Politics, Democracy and the Internet -- all of them predicted great doom if the masses could freely comment on their politics. All of them have been proven to be ill-informed alarmists with little real understanding of a medium that they fought so desperately to destroy. They are relics of a bygone era.

People should keep in mind as they consider going to Carol Darr's annual conference next year. This is an organization and executive director with a proven record of trying to destroy people-powered involvement in politics. If you are an establishment type seeking ways to undermine and destroy people-powrered politics, then by all means attend. Everyone else should steer clear. (I'll keep particular tabs on the event's sponsors.)

On the web: Carol Darr (dKos tag, lots of background)

Carol Darr runs the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet at George Washington University. She is also one of the First Amendment's biggest foes, tirelessly working to ensure that online political speech be regulated by the government lest real people have a voice.

When the FEC was considering regulating blogs, under judicial order to do so, Darr wrote in comments to the FEC, on behalf of IPDI:

The ramifications of the bloggers' demand are enormous. The issue before the FEC goes to the heart of the fundamental questions that define a democracy's relationship to a free press: Who should be treated as a journalist, and what special privileges, if any, should they receive?

"Special privileges" of the press. That's what Darr thought the FEC's job was. To protect the "special privileges" for journalists. It was an embarrassing performance by someone representing a major university. At the time, I was so struck by Darr's rabid efforts on behalf of journalist "special privileges" that I mused out loud:

[Darr's] defenses of old world journalism at the expense of Internet media, while heading the Institute of Politics, Democracy and the Internet, is so out of place you'd think she was a journalism professor or married to one.

The FEC eventually ruled with the bloggers, giving us everything we wanted, and Darr continues to kvetch from the sidelines, as this article shows. But one line caught my eye:

But another troubling aspect of the ruling for Darr is that the traditional press privilege of protecting the anonymity of sources will be diminished and its right to refuse to answer prosecutors' and grand juries' questions about those sources will be jeopardized when every hack with access to broadband can be a reporter. Her husband, George Washington University journalism professor Albert L. May, once worked for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in Little Rock.

Looks like I called that one. It would be nice if GWU had someone running the IPDI who truly was interested in discussing and protecting democracy and the internet, instead of someone who was commited to destroying the First Amendment in order to "protect" the "special privileges" of her husband's profession.

IPDI is a joke and will continue being a joke as long as Darr runs the operation. Anyone who supports it is supporting an operation dedicated to destroying the political internet.

Lucky for all of us, there is an alternative organization truly committed to growing the internet as a platform for people-powered politics -- the Personal Democracy Forum.

Their annual conference is coming up May 15 in NYC and I'm happy to say I'll be a speaker.

Once more, into the breach, because this fairly interesting overview in the Chronicle of Higher Education of the campaign finance law/internet fight might leave you wondering about a few assertions by Carol Darr, bête noire of the issue.  So read the article and accompanying chat, and then let's review a few points:

1. Did Carol Darr and the reform community win anything from the FEC regulations?

No.

While it's true that online paid advertising will be regulated, that's not something which any blogger opposed.   Whether it's the generally right-leaning Online Coalition ("the Commission should move forward with its proposal to include the term 'paid advertisements on the Internet' under the definition of 'public communication') or our own filing ("proposed regulations amending 11 CFR §§ 109.21 and 109.37 regarding coordinated communications are within the proper scope of the regulations"), no bloggers opposed this common-sense step.

On every issue where we parted from the reform community, however, we won and they lost.  The FEC did the following things that we supported and they opposed:
* granting a full, robust media exception to speakers on the Internet
* protecting expressly partisan behavior by bloggers, including fundraising, without falling into political committee status, as opposed to Darr's demand that "the FEC must insist that anyone who avails him or herself of the media exception should not operate as a political activist (including raising money) in the same election"
* removing nonsensical "1 hour per week, 4 hours per month" restrictions on the use of office computers for online political activity and replacing it a "are you getting your work done, and is anyone coercing you to engage in politics?" standard
* exempting state party websites from pain-in-the-ass rules on allocation

Note: I posed the question to Darr in the chat: "Carol, given that no bloggers in their comments and testimony before the FEC opposed extending McCain-Feingold to paid online advertising, and given that the FEC seemed to take the bloggers' side on every issue in dispute (robust media exemption, explicit support for partisan and fundraising activity online, etc.) . . . how, exactly, was this a victory for your views?"  

She declined to respond to any question I posed in the chat, and, for what it's worth, has declined to appear at a panel on this issue to which we were both invited next month.

Daniel Glover from the National Journal's Beltway Blogroll has a nice summary piece today that tries to sum up what's been accomplished over the past year.  Here's your lede:

Bloggers won. That was the consensus two weeks ago, after a yearlong, off-and-on blog swarm that clearly shaped the thinking of the Federal Election Commission about campaign finance rules for the Internet.

That consensus is on the mark, too. Ordered by a federal court to write those rules, the FEC ultimately gave bloggers exactly what they wanted: a broad exemption from regulations that focus instead on political advertisements online.

Bloggers will not have to disclose election-related payments they receive, nor will they have to post disclaimers about such payments. In essence, the six federal election commissioners voted unanimously to preserve free speech online, at least to the extent the court would allow.

So now that the Internet campaign law of the land is settled, at least for the moment, what does it mean for the blogosphere in 2006, 2008 and beyond?

To answer that question, Glover interviewed former FEC Commissioner Brad Smith, Skeptic's Eye blogger (and former FEC staffer) Allison Hayward, the Center for Democracy & Technology's John Morris and our longtime nemesis, Carol Darr from the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet, and you can read those interviews in full at those links.

There are good tidbits in each.  John Morris has some strong words about the future he believes the new rules empower:

What the FEC rules do is to give a very clear green light to bloggers, rather than an yellow light that says "go talk to a lawyer." So the vast majority of bloggers will be able to concentrate on their political discussions and debate rather than wondering whether they are complying with rules that were not really meant for them.

I think bloggers will indeed gain more influence in elections because bloggers will keep both campaigns and mainstream media from "setting the agenda" too narrowly. Moreover, a great contribution that bloggers make is that almost everything any candidate says will get questioned, challenged and rebutted by some blog out there, and that should make the political debate more open and ultimately more honest.

So what do the reformers fear now?  From Darr, in response to a question about potential abuses:

CD: The potential is for large amounts of undisclosed money from foreign governments and individuals, and of course from deep pocketed American individuals, corporations and unions. Many of these potential abuses are not the result of the FEC's new Internet regs but are more attributable to larger changes in the media and in technology, and in the increasing polarization of U.S. politics, in which the meaner attacks are outsourced to third parties, who are less accountable.

I expect to see lots of funny/mean JibJab-style political videos, lots of micro-targeted e=mails, and undisclosed payments to bloggers made by third parties, not candidates, in order to escape disclosure. . . .

BB: How long before we see abuses? Will it happen in 2006? 2008? Or are the FEC rules solid enough to prevent abuses?

CD: Just because abuses happen, doesn't mean the public will necessarily be aware of them. I expect the activities to start immediately. Exemptions and loopholes never go unexploited for long, but if you have a good lawyer, the funding of many of these activities can escape public disclosure.

Yes, that's right: after the Commies sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids, they're going to take over our blogs.

Of course, nothing she fears in the Internet can't also go on in other media.  I would, however, still point our international readers to this FEC brochure on Foreign Nationals if you have any questions about your rights and obligations.  (In short: speech good, money bad, and read this 1981 advisory opinion.)

The future is in our hands, and the best antidote to "bad speech" remains more speech -- and your speech.  Let me know if you have any questions, comments, concerns, etc.

Once again, a lesson in journalistic ethics from Fox News. (Hat tip to AMERICAblog.)

Sean Hannity, co-host of the Fox News Channel's Hannity & Colmes, is apparently no longer content just to ask Rick Santorum softball questions every time he shows up on Sean's show. Hannity will be in Western Pennsylvania tomorrow to attend a fund raiser for Rick.

Here's what the Johnstown Tribune-Democrat says:

A newsman? No way

A scheduled appearance here Saturday by a big-name conservative talk-show host has raised more than a few eyebrows.

Sean Hannity, co-host of the Fox News "Hannity and Colmes" political talk show, will appear at a fund-raising breakfast with U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum, who is seeking re-election.

Said G. Terry Madonna, a Pennsylvania political analyst, "The talk shows are part entertainment, part politics."

That's clearly the case with Hannity.

It would be interesting to see the reaction of the folks at the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet on this one. You might remember their comments at last summer's FEC hearings.

4. Should bloggers be given the media exemption?

Just as national politics was once an insiders' game, news coverage of national politics and serious political commentary were once the exclusive domain of media elites. Not any more  Bloggers have "democratized' journalism, and a coalition of bloggers has demanded the same wholesale exemption from the federal campaign finance laws that is currently provided to so-called mainstream media.    

That exemption allows traditional journalists to fully communicate and coordinate with candidates, online or offline, and then spend, through their corporate employers, unlimited amounts of money publishing whatever news or commentary they please, favorable or unfavorable, fair or unfair, in any distribution channel: TV, radio, newspapers, magazines or the Internet....

On its face, the bloggers' request for rights equal to those of mainstream media seems reasonable. Their online readership, in a few instances, exceeds those of mid-sized daily newspapers, and their influence and legitimacy continues to grow, in some cases exponentially. Last summer, dozens of bloggers were issued press credentials at the two national party conventions, and several of them have been credentialed by the House and Senate Press Galleries. Recently a blogger was given a day pass to the White House Press Room.  

Some bloggers want it both ways, however. They want to preserve their rights as political activists, donors and even fundraisers -- activities regulated by campaign finance laws -- yet at the same time enjoy the broad exemption from the campaign finance laws afforded to traditional journalists....

For thirty years the campaign finance laws have made a fundamental distinction between political activists and the news media, in order to protect a free press while at the same time limiting the influence of big money on federal elections. Until recently, the distinction between the news media and rest of us was clear and uncontroversial.

Bloggers blur that distinction. If anyone can publish a blog, and if bloggers are treated as journalists, then we can all become journalists. If millions of "citizen journalists," as bloggers like to call themselves, are given the rights and privileges of the news media, two consequences will follow....

[One] consequence is that the privileged status the press currently enjoys will diminish. When that happens, an erosion of its most important privilege, its ability through shield laws to protect the anonymity of its sources, will surely follow. While the FEC has no jurisdiction over shield laws, a change in the rules defining the news media in one arena is bound to affect other laws. As the pool of those considered journalists quickly expands, it is inevitable that the media's fragile privilege to refuse to answer questions about sources posed by prosecutors and grand juries will narrow.    

The ramifications of the bloggers' demands are enormous. The issue before the FEC goes to the heart of the fundamental questions that define a democracy's relationship to a free press: Who should be treated as a journalist, and what special privileges, if any, should they receive?

I think we need to have Carol Darr explain to us again the distinctions between bloggers and journalists in campaign finance. And then we really need to have a bloggers' ethics conference.

Update [2005-7-9 2:13:13 by Armando]: Bumped by Armando

Salon's Zachary Ross is surprisingly dense.

During the 2004 Democratic primaries, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, who runs the Daily Kos blog, was criticized by a reporter at the Columbia Journalism Review (full disclosure: It was me) for an apparent breach of journalistic ethics. Kos had posted the results of exit surveys before polls had closed, potentially affecting the integrity of the vote. In response, Kos argued that, as a blogger, he wasn't bound by conventional notions of journalistic propriety: "We're activists," he wrote of himself and his fellow political bloggers. "Not reporters. Not talking heads. Not journalists. But activists. The difference is stark."

Fast-forward to late last month, when the Federal Election Commission held hearings to help determine whether political blogs should enjoy a "freedom of the press" exemption from campaign finance regulations [...]

This time, Kos was understandably eager to claim the mantle of journalism. In written comments to the FEC, he and two other bloggers asserted: "At their best, bloggers are true journalists, contacting sources, researching facts and raising public awareness of vital issues. Even at their 'worst,' bloggers perform the same function as talk radio hosts or opinion journalists in the print and televised media, energizing partisan supporters through humor, vitriol and innuendo."

Kos' evolving self-definition is a symptom of the precarious position in which political blogs now find themselves...

I guess I have to hold Zach's hand and walk him through this carefully ....

I don't claim I'm a journalist. I never claimed I was a journalist. I don't plan on claiming I'm a journalist. Never in my testimony did I say that. So where does he get this thing about my "evolving definition"? Because I said some bloggers are journalists. Like Josh Marshall. Like SusanG on this site. There IS journalism happening in the blogosphere, even if I'm not one of its practitioners.

The media exemption has nothing to do with "journalism", and everything to do with "media". That's how Rush gets the media exemption, as does Paul Begala and James Carville. And the Daily Show, Bill Maher, and Oprah. And so on. They're not journalists. They're media. I'm not a journalist. I'm media.

You think this wouldn't be so hard. Sheez.

But the good news --

While the piece includes the tiresome apocalyptic whinings of Carol Darr (whose defenses of old world journalism at the expense of Internet media, while heading the Institute of Politics, Democracy and the Internet, is so out of place you'd think she was a journalism professor or married to one), it also included favorable quotes from FEC commissioner Ellen Weintraub.

That's important because as one of the Democrats on the commission, she appears to be the fourth vote toward giving bloggers the media exemption (the three Republicans are solid, from all indications).

Even Commissioner Weintraub, who's paid to worry about potential abuses of the campaign finance system, doesn't sound too concerned: "What the bloggers very persuasively argued [in the hearings] is that the only thing that gives a blog value is that person's credibility online. And some corporate-funded hack who's out there blogging away is probably not going to get a lot of hits. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe this will turn out to be some horrible problem. But the example that was given in the hearing, of the Halliburton blog, I mean, who's gonna read that?"

Money has never been able to influence behavior online. Big corporations have gone online hoping to influence consumers, only to have consumers turn the tables and influence the corporations. Heck, it's the lesson of the Dean campaign -- it wasn't Dean influencing voters, it was the other way around. It's what fueled the phenomenon, the feeling of empowerment the web created.

The most successful web companies provide personalized services and goods, rather then force feed them one-size-fits-all goods and services. All the money in the world can't change that equation, either in the corporate world or in the political realm.

So Halliburton throws $1 million into their poli-blog. So what? Weintraub is absolutely right, who is going to read it? It's not like television where we're generally stuck watching the ad. People would have to GO to the Halliburton blog, and who'd do that?

Furthermore, we'd be just as able to counter whatever that blog would have to say. Halliburton's millions couldn't stop tens of thousands of bloggers from tearing its blog apart, dissecting its content, exposing any lies. This is not a medium where money can drown out any opposition. Heck, Halliburton's millions would probably amplify the opposition.

But that's not the best argument for granting bloggers the media exemption. The best argument is quite simple -- why should bloggers be treated differently than other media? We have blatant partisans writing and speaking and performing in other media, oftentimes fundraising for partisan causes, all enjoying the media exemption. Heck, the Republican Party practically owns Fox News Channel.  

So if partisanship doesn't set us aside from traditional media, what does? If this story is any indication, it looks like the FEC is having a hard time figuring that out as well. And that bodes well for the final decision.

I sent a private email to a former IPDI staffer, directed at Carol Darr, that was undoubtedly angry. Darr reacted angrily to the email, and forwarded it in a bizarre letter to the Chairman of the FEC.

This morning, I have sent the following email in response to the FEC and Ms. Darr:

For the record, I didn't even know IPDI's annual conference was a big fundraising event. But still, the anger she has displayed at the perceived efforts to squelch her free speech is the same anger I feel at her overt and active efforts to squelch mine.

Like I wrote, I do love the irony that Darr is using her freedom of speech to deny my ability to do fundraising on behalf of others, and complains that I'm planning to use my own freedom of speech to deny her ability to fundraise on behalf of herself.

Update: Oops. Sorry for not providing context. If you want to understand the root of this disagreement, start with this post, then read this one.

So I'm on my daily ride (on my Time VX Edge with Campy Chorus), grinding up the Berkeley Hills, trying to figure out what exactly Carol Darr was trying to do with her ridiculous comments to the FEC.

This passage kept playing through my mind, in which Darr argues that bloggers shouldn't enjoy the media exemption::

Keep in mind, this is the official mission of the FEC:Yet Darr, for some bizarre reason, thinks the purpose of the FEC is to protect the "priviliges" of the journalistic profession.

The FEC's mission isn't to decide the "fundamental questions that define a democracy's relationship to a free press". It's to disclose campaign finance information and enforce limits and prohibitions on contributions.

The fact that Darr misfires on this question goes beyond to embarrassing. This is the head of an academic organization, in a top American university (George Washington Univ.), tasked with studying the role of the Internet on our democracy. And she doesn't even understand the basic mission of the FEC.

Such incompetence truly should shame GWU. It really is embarrassing.

Update: As acbonin points out in the comments, Darr's contention is completely and utterly contradicted by law:

As I said, her comments to the FEC are embarrassing.

IPDI is the Institute for Politics, Democracy, and the Internet at George Washington University. They are led by a woman called Carol Darr. And they submitted these comments to the FEC arguing against giving citizen media a media exemption.

The hopelessly naive, astonishingly ill-informed comment starts like this (page six):

Wow. So much crap to sort through it's hard to know where to start. But let's focus on this part?What a steaming pile of you know what! Here's a community project. Use the comments to list examples of how political activists have permeated the "news media" to "blur that distinction".

Make no mistake, this attempt by Ms. Darr is just the latest by academic pinheads to degrade the role of citizens in the media space. They once dominated the industry, and can't stand that literally anyone and EVERYONE is now media. And no, I'm not speculating. She spells it out clearly (page 8):

This is about protecting what they see as their special perks. And even though partisans have invaded the news media for some time, Darr is hoping to make an example of bloggers.

Because it's not about "media" versus "political activists". It's DC Establishment versus those of us outside of DC. THAT's what blowhards like Darr are trying to protect.

So please offer up examples of political activists inside the media machine (like Roger Ailes, Paul Begala, etc.) so we can blow that asinine argument out of the water.

These campus blogethicists like Carol Darr at IPDI love to pontificate about the harm that bloggers cause their precious profession, even as they fail to understand that bloggers are, in huge part, a response to the failings of their profession. So they pontificate from their ivory towers, oblivious to the excesses and failures of "legitimate" journalists around them.

Update: acbonin, who is writing our response to the FEC, also tackles the issue in this diary.

Via Krempasky, the Institute for Politics, Democracy, & the Internet and George Washington University has now posted its comments on the FEC regulations.  HTML, PDF.

In general, they advocate broad reform of campaign finance rules in response to new technology, much of which cannot be done without Congress.  Fine, whatever.

But when it comes to bloggers, watch out: