As a candidate, I could broadcast any ad I want to. But corporations are expressly barred from running such ads. So, I will form a non-stock, non-profit corporation for the sole and exclusive purpose of running the in-your-face ad.
As a candidate I can get the ad on the air. By using a corporation to produce it, I can force the authorities either to come after me, or abandon the law. Both sides of the equation are necessary to make this work.
John / Billybob
I don't get it. The authorities will come after you, and then what's your recourse? It can't be fighting it in court. No court is going to overturn the law which the Supreme Court just upheld.
It seems to me that the only way to fight this is in Congress.
Aren't most campaign ads produced by a corporation?
I have a problem. Having thought so long and hard on the subject of the first amendment that you could smell the wood burning all the way from New York, I think that the government has a right to censor broadcasting. That is, if it has the right to create and sustain broadcasting, it has the inherent right to censor it.Broadcasting is not a mere matter of getting some electronics and putting a plug in the wall and chattering into a microphone--that is mere radio wave emission. Broadcasting is having the government censor everyone else in your neighborhood from doing likewise at your frequency. Censorship inheres in broadcasting, and there is a constitutional problem at its very core.
Since broadcasting is by now a tradition--not to say, a major industry--we have a serious problem. The Constitution was in that sense "broke" before most of us were born. And as much as I have ruminated over the issue, I have no real idea of how it might be fixed. And inasmuch as your Asheville broadcaster depends utterly on his government license, and you are merely opposing censorship which is inherent in that very license, If I were a lawyer (rather than a retired engineer) with a responsibility to faithfully advise a client as to his interests, I would say that this is a windmill-joust.
The First Amendment says we have a right to speak, and an implied right to listen if we choose to meet the criteria necessary to get within earshot. The FCC puts us within earshot, provided we so choose to buy and tune in our receiver (we do at least retain, so far, the right not to do that). But only within earshot of particular people who are FCC licensees. The rest of us have the right to listen and the duty to shut up--and have accepted that duty all our lives.
Censorship of broadcast campaign ads is simply an extension of that inherent censorship, and it even makes sense once you have made the fatal mistake of accepting FCC definition of "the public interest." The broadcasters, with the approval of the FCC, conflate "the public interest" with "what interests the public."
The public interest is universal understanding of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence--and of history generally. The public interest is clarity of thought, and action of voters to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. What interests the public, OTOH, includes depiction of attractive females, and suchlike. The problem is that "The News" is interesting like a train wreck, and does not edify.
The public is interested in what votes have been decided in eastern time zones, irrespective of the fact that that knowledge would and routinely does affect the vote in western time zones. The public interest is that each voter cast their vote for the protection of the Constitution, irrespective of that. The difference between the two was the suppressed turnout in the FL panhandle--and very nearly the overturning of the '00 election.