Longtime pending reform moves ahead, enforcement still far from clear

by Brian Leubitz

The FPPC has been looking at regulating “bloggers” and social media for a while now. For a good review of some of their early discussions, see Julia Rosen’s post from their 2010 hearing on the subject. But yesterday they passed the new regulations:

Bloggers and others who are paid to post political messages online are subject to new disclosure rules under regulations the Fair Political Practices Commission approved Thursday.

Campaign committees will now have to report who they pay to post “favorable or unfavorable” content on blogs, social media or online videos on their campaign finance statements, and report the name of the website where the content appears.

“The purpose overall is to let the public know that they can go compare what the campaign is paying for to what is showing up online,” said FPPC attorney Heather Rowan.(SacBee)

I don’t doubt that the FPPC’s heart is in the right place, but as Steven Maviglio points out, the system is unworkable from any number of levels. And as former Schwarzenegger aide Rob Stutzman is quoted in the Bee, the system creates regulatory road blocks without actually helping voters discern what is paid for communication.

Now, I should also point out that I am occasionally paid by campaigns, but I’ve been using disclosures on each and every post associated with those campaigns. Not to be too self-congratulatory here, but I think it is just the right thing to do. However, these regulations don’t require that, but rather require reporting to the FPPC. That could be useful if somebody follows up on those FPPC forms in some database, but there are certainly no guarantees of clarity.

Furthermore, the devil is in the details. The current regulation leaves a lot of room for interpretation. How will campaign employees twitter accounts be regulated? How will they manage enforcement of occasionally pseudonymous or anonymous internet postings? And are these regulations constitutional under the Supreme Court’s (rather extreme) First Amendment jurisprudence?

Those questions will likely be answered during the next campaign cycle or two. The risk is that by the time those questions are answered, a whole new set will have taken their place.

To: (insert fun and in no way dated Communist Party reference here) Comrades Phil Trounstine and Jerry Roberts

From: Dave

I read with interest your dripping-with-contempt response to my criticism of your reports on the Parsky Commission.  Actually, 4/5 of the article concerned the Commission itself and not you, but I am reminded of the words of Carly Simon:

You’re so vain

You probably think this song is about you

As a regular reader of Calbuzz, I admire your sources, if not your willingness to string an entire article together based on two politicians standing next to one another smiling, as well as an over-emphasis on horse-race politics and narratives.  But clearly, you have a bit of an inflated view of your clear-eyed mission of “journalism,” and the assumed objectivity that goes with it.

Allow me to be blunt: Calitics has been writing about the Parsky Commission since December of 2008, before there was such a thing as Calbuzz.  We have followed up time and again, in particular when two weeks ago, Susan Kennedy tipped the hand of how this commission would go by stating that “Our revenue stream is way too progressive.”  So it was not exactly some kind of amazing scoop to report on a commission that has open meetings and presents all their material in public, which is why plenty of contemporaneous reports were written, based on the documents posted on the Internet that the Parsky Commission presented in anticipation of their open meeting.

Unlike you, I don’t pretend to hide my opinions on the very clear economic and tax policy implications of the Commission’s report behind some false veil of objectivity.  Most of my comments were directed at the report itself, and the way in which a flat tax would quite obviously shift the burden of taxation to the middle class and the poor; but I couldn’t help but notice clear language like…

the impending bankruptcy of state government should be sufficient to show players at every point of the political spectrum not only that sweeping change is needed, but also that everyone will have to compromise to keep California from sinking into the 9th Circle of Hell

…which certainly allows people, in my view, a window into how you determine the best policy, defined as the midpoint between whatever pleases those hateful hippies and the ranters on the right.  That may be a nice and quick methodology, but it’s anything but rigorous, and I’m pretty sure it’s an apt description.  After all, wasn’t one of you the communications director for Gray Davis, who was not above bold expressions of centrism and a fear of the spectre of “The Left”?  

(How did pumping out that daily message for ol’ Gray turn out, by the way?  What did that guy do after his two successful terms were up?  Just curious.)

I mean, I’m very sorry for bringing up the inconvenient fact that so-called “objective” journalists can frame a story in such a way that they put their own thumbs on the ideological scale.  You claim that your job is to “ferret out the facts” of the policymakers, you know, like hard-hitting reporting on an email to supporters and what one Republican said about another Republican in a press release, but it’s fairly clear from the above-mentioned article that you view flat taxes and eliminating corporate taxes as pretty sensible and down the middle, and it colored your coverage.  I should probably just have shut up about it and gone back to my Communist Party self-criticism sessions, which by the way is a hilarious and timely joke.  Here’s another one: In Soviet Russia, television watches you! You can use that!)

So this notion that I should just say thank you for illuminating a public document seems to me to be a bit too self-regarding, and your lashing out at me for pointing out the not-so-hidden biases in that particular article a bit too “the lady doth protest too much.”  But of course, I have an infantile disorder.

Which brings us to this criticism about the Barbara Boxer press conference and certain bloggers clapping at the end of it, something of a hobby horse for you folks.  I am not going to speak for anyone in the room but myself, but I know quite for certain that I didn’t clap, and I know what I asked.  See, based on my notes (yes, I took them, just like a real live reporter) I know that I followed up a series of queries about torture (yours was some process question about how the Obama Administration “rolled out” the torture memos released a week before) with a specific question about a resolution before the state party seeking the impeachment of Jay Bybee for his role in authorizing torture, to which she answered “I’m very open to that,” reminding those assembled that she voted against Bybee’s confirmation as a federal judge.  Now, at the time, I was involved in securing thousands of signatures from across the state endorsing this resolution, and when it came before the resolutions committee, I would argue that having Sen. Boxer’s agreement that calling for the impeachment of someone who helped authorize torture was a reasonable request actually helped get that resolution passed.  In other words, it was a combination of what the netroots community does best – using citizen journalism and activism in tandem to effect progress on progressive issues.

Which I personally think is more of a relevant bit of work than asking a federal legislator about a state issue.

I’m just sayin’.

p.s. In the cited post, I used variations on the word “fetish” once, in a 1,400-word article.  But it made for a smashing joke about therapists, so points for you!

A lot of people are talking today about Sen. Obama’s stance against Prop. 8; it’s a recommended diary on Daily Kos.  We had this on Calitics two days ago and nobody noticed.  The Sacramento Bee reports on it and suddenly it’s on everybody’s lips.

I don’t begrudge the Bee writing about the issue; it’s newsworthy, and the result of a letter read to the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club, not some secret.  I’m glad they picked it up.  But I’m very disturbed by the fact that progressive media is not supported to the point of being ignored, but when a dead-tree source goes with the same information it becomes a top story.  I expect that out of the traditional media, but not the blogosphere.  There is no question that Brian was the first person anywhere to report on Sen. Obama’s letter to the club.  And I can tell you that I did at least some behind-the-scenes work to promote the scoop to progressive media and blogosphere leaders.  Didn’t work.

I don’t care that the Bee didn’t report that Calitics was the first source to break this; would have been nice, but not totally necessary.  But could bloggers at least note that we had this two days before the traditional media?  If we aren’t self-reinforcing we’re never going to get anywhere.

The headline on the feed read “Blogger threatens LA campus shooting”.

The title on the story read

Student Threatens LA Campus Shooting

By NOAKI SCHWARTZ

Associated Press Writer

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Los Angeles police arrested a 21-year-old Loyola Marymount University student in connection with an online threat to shoot people on campus, officials said Saturday.

Police arrested Carlos Huerta, a senior at Loyola, for investigation of making criminal threats. Huerta was taken into custody on Saturday night near his apartment on campus.

Huerta is suspected of posting a message that he would shoot and kill as many people as possible on campus before being killed himself by police, authorities said. The threat appeared on Juicycampus.com, a chat board that describes itself as having the “simple mission of enabling online anonymous free speech on college campuses.”

THe bottom of the story had this correction

“This version CORRECTS description of Web site as chat board instead of blog.)

I haven’t been blogging long and I used to think most of us lefties were paranoid but this is ridiculous. How by any stretch of the imagination is the subject of the story  a “BLOGGER”?

We must really be disturbing the MSM.Insistance on issues rather than solely covering the horserace is beginning to take it’s toll.That’s obvious when the stretch is as broad as in this instance. Bloggers are the enemy!Keep up the pressure, the more time they spend falsely flogging us, the less time they have to spin and spread GOP talking points.

I was up half the night putting together this little video for the Courage Campaign’s effort to fight the Republican dirty trick to split California’s electoral votes and steal the Presidential election.  We got a handful of semi-famous bloggers together (Jane Hamsher from Firedoglake, John Amato from Crooks and Liars, Howie Klein from Down With Tyranny, some Kos diarists, and more) and sent a message that we can fight this thing, energize California Democrats, and make the Republicans wish they never brought it up in the first place.

The Courage Campaign is setting up a conference call featuring Bradley Whitford of The West Wing to discuss the next steps.  You can RSVP for it at the link.

Let me just say that I think this resolutions thing is a much ado about nothing.  More than anything it is instructive for how the party responds to its rank-and-file.  Nevertheless, I’m here, and so your intrepid blogger will follow it for you.

But first of all, let me make a couple remarks about Art Torres’ comments in the general session.  I’m disappointed and annoyed that he resorted to blaming “the blogs” for criticism that the Party received after the last convention, as part of some comments that he made justifying the CDP’s efforts to compete statewide.  It’s an unfair and deliberately vague characterization.  What blogs?  Which bloggers?  Is there anything specific?  And can you say with a straight face that the ONLY or even the main people to take issue with various matters that happened at the convention are bloggers?  The rank-and-file grassroots wrote those resolutions.  The rank-and-file grassroots had the problems with how they were handled in the resolutions committee.  They had the issues with the quorum call.  They led the fight to create an Audit Committee and the resultant fallout.

We REPORTED it.  And I stand behind my belief that reporting the facts and making opinions on policies and events are NOT personal attacks.  It’s a convenient excuse to blame “mean dirty hippie bloggers” for every criticism ever leveled at the Party.  People have substantive questions, and blogs are one way, and really one of the smaller ways, for people to express those questions.  I think that, at least on this site, there was an extremely healthy debate about the convention fallout, and it’s simply unfair for Torres to lash out in that way.

I will add that the fact that Torres felt the need to defend himself, and defend the Party’s goal of electing Democrats statewide and implementing a 58-county strategy, is a win in itself.  I think we all want to work to that end; it’s certainly a major part of what we do here at Calitics.  You can quote me on that, Art.  By name.

I’ll toss some notes about the Resolutions Committee in the extended entry.

So far, not much has really happened.  The Iraq resolution (the real sticking point at last year’s convention) is being worked on through Karen Bernal on the sidelines.  Still waiting on the only resolutions that interest me, one on parole and sentencing reform, and the merged net neutrality resolution.

For those of you who are interested in the rough-and-tumble intersection of new and old media (and why the blogosphere went after the SF Chronicle’s David Lazarus) I’ve got some thoughts on it here

Frank Russo won his battle with the Capitol Correspondent’s Association of California, and became the first blogger to receive full credentialing to all Legislative events in California.  This is fantastic, to have a great progressive writer who actually likes to cover the goings-on in Sacramento be given the tools and the means to do so.  This is good news for all of us who cover California politics, as we’ll be able to cultivate a source we trust who will take us beyond the media spin.  Congratulations, Frank.

Also at the Capitol Weekly this week (besides me, fabulous me!) is a good recap of the Capitol Correspondents Association/blogger credentialing flap.  Association members are voting today on whether to impose an income test as a condition for getting press access to the Capitol.  In the name of allowing credentials for bloggers, the move would restrict pretty much everybody who blogs, as it would require any reporter to earn half their income from media jobs.

Membership does have its privileges. Reporters gain direct access to the floors of both houses, get face time with lawmakers, can mingle with the staffs of the legislators and the committees, and are on the inside watching in real time as policy and politics and power unfold–and unravel. Print and wire reporters, editorial writers, TV reporters, radio reporters, columnists, newsletter reporters, magazine writers, still and action photographers–all carry those laminated photo IDs authorized by the Legislature’s Joint Rules Committee, acting on the Association’s recommendations.

Traditionally dominated by print reporters, the Association gradually has absorbed other journalistic disciplines into its family. Radio, television, alternative magazines and newspapers, and newsletters all have joined the club over time as each new category was subjected to scrutiny as real newsies.

But the explosion of bloggers has left the association searching for a test of what makes a real journalist.

Like their predecessors, the credentialing dispute reflects tensions between the established media and the new media–of acceptance and credibility–as much as access to the Capitol. The clash is inevitable because the established media make the decision.

It’s a classic consequence of letting the gatekeepers make the rules; they’re obviously going to be favorable to them and primarily concerned with their own self-preservation.

There are not a vast amount of bloggers with the motivation and the wherewithal to obtain this Legislative credential and do this work.  But I want to highlight the real-world impact of this on one of our state’s finest online journalists.  Frank Russo runs The California Progress Report, one of the few media sources anywhere that covers the legislative process in Sacramento, and he does it with more vibrancy and more earnestness than anybody else around.  I often use the CPR to understand what is happening in the Legislature, to get information you simply can’t get anywhere else.  He is the poster child for the basic unfairness of this ruling.

There wasn’t exactly a crush of bloggers seeking credentialing. But one who did was Oakland-based attorney Frank Russo, a Democrat and author of the California Progress Report. Russo was credentialed last year through the speaker’s office and sought to renew the credential for 2007, but he was unable to.

When asked why his application was rejected, Russo said: “It beats the heck out of me. When I submitted my application on January 3, I complied with the Joint Rules. I just don’t think it’s right that you should have to wait two months and then have the rules changed on you.” Russo says that few bloggers actually make money off their blogs, thus eliminating them in an income test.

“Frank Russo gets his butt out of the chair and goes out and reports,” said Robert Salladay, who runs the Los Angeles Times’ political blog, Political Muscle. “Our main task is news gathering. Legitimate bloggers should be engaged, which means picking up the phone, going to events and reporting.”

Russo wrote his own article on this decision, and he noted the First Amendment element to this issue.

Last year. I received a press badge from the California legislature. If I’m a “blogger,” maybe I’ve made history. I’m not sure I qualify as a blogger, certainly in the strictest sense of the word as it got started with individuals keeping what they referred to as “diaries.” I think of myself as maintaining a website that contains articles and commentary written by me and others about California politics and policy. But I don’t think this should make one hill of a bean’s worth of difference in my First Amendment rights and that of my readers to be able to get the information I pass on, analyze, and state my opinions about.

In fact, a seminal California Court of Appeals decision O’Grady v. Superior Court 139 Cal. App. 4th 1423; 44 Cal. Rptr. 3d 72 (2006) found that bloggers are journalists under the California Constitution and our state’s shield law. As a member of the bar of California, I especially enjoyed reading that decision and the Court’s discussion of what has been evolving. In my article about this decision last May, I concluded:

There is a lot more here to this decision. Its reach is huge. If it stands, it will be cited for years to come on issues involving the internet, undoubtedly in ways that we haven’t contemplated.
The times, they are a changing. The San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News are among the papers to report on this decision and its importance. The established press is changing too, and some are becoming bloggers […]

Gutenberg invented the printing press and that is what the colonists had–hand cranked presses when the First Amendment freedom”of the press” was written. I’ve seen those presses at Williamsburg and told my son how important they were. Back then you had to own a press to get out information. Now you can do the same, but you don’t have to own the internet. There is nothing I am doing on a daily basis that is different from those first journalists in America. If you want to read about this, I suggest “INFAMOUS SCRIBBLERS: The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism” by Eric Burns.

The First Amendment should not be for sale in California with the vendor being the established press. We don’t need the equivalent of a poll tax for journalists. I value my freedom and don’t want to sit at the back of the bus. I’ll be driving to Sacramento tomorrow to cover the news. Stay tuned.

It is vital to the future of new media that this gets resolved.  Whether the ultimate outcome goes through the courts or is reached through compromise, it is vital that the means of journalistic production does not become an impediment to access to the tools needed to create that production.  Some establishment journalists fear the blogosphere and want to keep the responsibility of a free press all to themselves.  If the California Legislature was interested in serving the people, they would put pressure on the CCAC to allow those dedicated enough to want to amplify their message to be able to do so.

Just got this in an email:

Steve Geissinger, Capitol reporter for MediaNews and president of the Capitol Corresspondents Association, reports that the association board is proposing new rules that would allow bloggers into the organization, making them eligible for the legislative credentials needed to access the Senate and Assembly floors and to attend many Capitol news conferences. Under the old rules, if a reporter didn’t work full time for a major print, radio or TV organization, he or she couldn’t be credentialed. But the association board, wishing to integrate bloggers into the press corps and under pressure from the Legislature and bloggers themselves, has called for a membership vote on the proposed new rules, Geissinger said. The new rules are in the form of amendments to the association by-laws and to its official membership application, and were developed largely by the association’s secretary-treasurer, reporter Laura Mahoney of the Bureau of National Affairs. Given that bloggers are not necessarily full-time reporters, the new rules require that applicants for credentials must, as before, be covering state government news but also must derive “at least half” their earned income from “media jobs,”  a term broad enough to cover web postings. Applicants then are required to list those jobs, including self employment, on their applications. And they are notified that a “willful misrepresentation” could cost them their credentials. Mahoney said the board developed the new rules after much thought and work and that they are taken largely from rules already adopted by reporters covering the US Congress.

I don’t think this goes far enough, actually.  We all know that acquiring half your income from blogging is pretty restrictive.  But it will apply to some, and push the door open a crack for more.  California has typically been ahead of the curve on this issue, at least on the Democratic side, allowing bloggers to attend the CDP Convention in 2003 (which kind of kicked off the Dean campaign).  Let’s hope this gets passed, and is a gateway to treating online media the same way as offline media.  You can review the proposed changes here.