Cititzens United: How much for an election?

Thanks to Citizens United, the candidates in the different races for the mid-term elections had a lot of money to spend on promoting themselves. As a result, television channels were inundated by political ads, and to be specific, by really nasty ones. As much as political ads can profit democracy when their purpose is to present the different candidates and their ideas to the voters, we can really wonder what negative ads can contribute to in a political campaign. The advertising strategy most of the candidates adopted was obviously not to give relevant information to help voters decide who would be the best candidate to represent their interests, but to create a buzz to get more advertisement (for free this time). Broadcasting those ads (sometimes really close to misinformation), the media which are supposed to create a public sphere in which the citizens can find the material to fuel a political debate, are actually hedging the debate. Especially when the people who paid for the ads are anonymous. Maybe a regulation on the ads as it exists in Canada, giving each candidate the same amount of advertising time on television would be a good way to prevent rich candidates from “buying” the elections.

What’s more, Citizens United allowed for the first time, media companies to contribute to political campaigns. Fox News for example donated one million dollar to the Republican Governors Association for this race. The link between Fox News and the Republican Party is not stunning news, but this new fact calls into question their point of view about the code of ethics of journalism: the truthfulness, accuracy, objectivity, impartiality, fairness and public accountability of the information they gave. Actually, the Democratic Governors Association asked Fox News to “add a formal disclaimer to your news coverage any time any of your programs cover governors or gubernatorial races between now and Election Day”, and that could be a solution to label partisan media as such. Then the audience would know what to believe or not.

At least, the whole campaign paid off the local stations’ debt…