I can’t understand how this is true. Federal law require that stations sell their ad time at the lowest-cost rates listed. If the stations didn’t sell their time to the candidates, then they were able to sell it at prevailing rates to others. Am I being asked to believe that there were mostly PSA’s and station ID’s on during programming breaks, instead of profitable business ads?
A lot of those slots wind up used on “self advertising”, ie commercials for other stuff on the same network. So it isn’t sell it cheap or sell it higher, it’s often sell it cheap or burn it. You’ll notice when there’s competitive races you’ll see a lot less self advertising. During the McSally-Barber dust up here (one of the most expensive congressional races ever) our networks pretty much didn’t advertise their own programming for a couple of week, but you’d get 2 or 3 McSvB ads every commercial break.