Wes Vernon
Wednesday, Nov. 10, 2004

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  Recall that when this McCain-Feingold legislation was passed, we were assured it would “take the money out of politics.”

Fat chance that would work as well in practice as it did in theory. All during the just-ended presidential race, major media giants gave the Kerry campaign “in-kind” contributions worth millions, literally without dropping a single reportable dime into the campaign coffers or into “independent,” pro-Democrat groups.

One of the more egregious examples was the collaboration between The New York Times and CBS on a hit piece clearly aimed at defeating President Bush. Further, there is some suspicion that they coordinated their failed “October surprise” with the Kerry campaign.

We were told that campaign finance “reform” was imperative because those supposed evil, moneyed “special interests” were polluting our dialogue. So Congress banned “outside independent groups” from buying ads promoting or opposing any candidate within 30 days of a primary and 60 days of a general election. Thus our virtuous political system would be squeaky clean. Right?

Well ... no.

In authoring the bill, Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., whose party has been favored for decades by the liberal news outlets, took care to let them off the hook. So, too, did his co-sponsor, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who identifies himself as a “Goldwater Republican” but goes out of his way to ingratiate himself with the left-wing establishment media, as he has done since the day he arrived in the Senate.

McCain and Feingold specifically exempted the news media from the new law’s anti-free speech mandates. In other words, the National Rifle Association (NRA), for example, is ordered to clam up in the days before the election. But Viacom (CBS), General Electric (NBC), Disney (ABC), the Washington Post and the New York Times — “huge corporations” all — can campaign for a candidate to their hearts' content. They just call it “news.”

Under the guise of “reporting,” the New York Times and CBS shamelessly went into the tank for the Kerry-Edwards ticket.

In the last week of the race, the New York Times ran a story that nearly 380 tons of explosives in Iraq were “missing” under the watch of the U.S. Army – a report re-released, so to speak, by Mohamed ElBaradei and the United Nations, by the way.

The report implied that the explosives had disappeared just within the last few days, and did not bother to mention that they were not found when U.S. forces arrived in Iraq, nor were they found when a thorough search was made a short time later. Apparently they had been moved before our troops arrived.

Sen. John Kerry, disregarding even the basic rules of evidence of truth, pounced on the story and ran with it in his ads and on the stump. This prompted outrage from conservative talk show hosts. Sean Hannity flatly accused the Democrat candidate of “lying through his teeth.”

The Kerry ads also turned a blind eye to common sense; i.e., anyone who tried to remove nearly 380 tones of explosives would have had to elude aerial surveillance of the facility that had formerly housed the weapons.

Ambassador L. Paul Bremer said it would be – to put it mildly – “highly unlikely” that the convoy of trucks and personnel required to remove all that tonnage could do so “without our noticing it.” That is not something you slip in your coat pocket or a suitcase.

Even though some of Kerry’s own advisers were skeptical of the story, Kerry himself forged ahead and pursued it with the same zeal with which he slandered his fellow Vietnam veterans in testimony back in 1971. Richard Holbrooke, a senior aide to the candidate, admitted, “I don’t know the truth.”

There is a curious timeline in all this:

CBS and the New York Times had worked on the story together as a team. CBS had planned to run it on “60 Minutes” Sunday, Oct. 31, just 36 hours before the election. (And that is less than 60 days before the election, now, isn’t it?)

However, CBS – apparently fearing some competitor would beat it to the punch – chose to allow its reporting partner, the Times, to front-page it on Monday, Oct. 25, followed by Dan Rather leading with it on his evening news broadcast that night.

Once again, we have a case of a media – hell-bent on defeating President Bush – rushing to judgment without adequate fact-checking. Shades of Rather’s National Guard forged documents disaster. Add to that the anchorman’s reported shock at the Republican sweep in 2004, and it is safe to say that man simply did not have a good election season.

Furthermore, before the ink was dry on the newsprint of the “explosives” story leaked by the United Nations in a time of war, the Kerry campaign was on the air with an ad slamming the president for failing to guard munitions that were never there after U.S. troops arrived.

The clockwork ease with which this story led to the new television ad – written produced, videotaped and distributed with amazing speed – prompted Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol to accuse the New York Times and CBS of “conspiring” with the Kerry-Edwards campaign to topple the president.

Ironically, even before McCain-Feingold, it was illegal for a political party or candidate’s campaign to collaborate with independent groups in developing strategy or ads. But under this new “reform” legislation, there is still nothing to prevent media corporations from coordinating with a campaign in a last-minute attack on the opposition.

Many other Swiss cheese-like loopholes in the new law have come to light. If they haven’t already convinced the public that McCain-Feingold is a farce and a failure, this should do it

As then-Congressman Steve Largent, R-Okla. observed at the time, the bill was debated: “Corporations that are not media companies or that do not own one would not be allowed to engage in political discourse, while corporations that are or that own media companies would be allowed. Is this fair? Is this democratic? The First Amendment to the Constitution says that Congress shall not abridge the freedom of the press. It says nothing about giving more freedom to the press than to any other segment of society.”

George Soros, Michael Moore, the Hollywood elite and others have clearly shown that the supposed aim of “getting the money out of politics” was a sham. If you dam water from going down one stream, it will find another channel. The same applies to money’s relation to politics.

More to the point, the law has empowered an already powerful media, just as its opponents had predicted.

Small wonder that the mainstream media were in the forefront of those urging “campaign finance reform,” an issue that never registered among the top concerns of the general public.

News corporations, through editorials and on-air “analysts,” agitated for the law’s enactment, and in the ’04 campaign they used their enhanced clout to try to influence an election with a last-minute hatchet job.

Eleventh-hour smears used to be the preserve of some politicians, with a supposedly “dispassionate” media reporting from the sidelines.

It takes guts for lawmakers to admit they made a mistake. Such humility is in short supply on Capitol Hill. Clearly McCain-Feingold was a blunder on their part. Sen. McCain in fact is making noises about adding more “reform” legislation. That would compound the damage. Someone has said that doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is ... well, just not wise.

For the good of the country, the 109th Congress that convenes in January should go about the business of putting this turkey out of its misery. As a “clean campaign” vehicle, it doesn’t pass the laugh test.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
2004 Elections
Campaign Finance Reform
Media Bias
Sen. John McCain