Today, the Federal Elections Commission
approved Stephen Colbert's Super-PAC. A lot of the discussion surrounding this episode had to with what a rejection of his application would mean to Fox News and their horde of politician-TV personalities (Palin, Huckabee, etc.). I was
more interested in the potential for an adjudication of who counts as "press" (partially because I figured this was an easy case). As I said before:
Onto the legal question: Should Colbert get the "media exemption" that is meant for the press? I don't see a principled way that he does not....
Ok, so Colbert gets the media exemption. But then (and I think this is what worries the above-referenced campaign finance lawyer), where does it end? Is this blog the press? Most of what we do is analysis and commentary, rather than "reporting" per se. But would the Editorial staff of the New York Times not be press? That's seems unlikely. Also, we do some reporting, for sure. I reported on the Michigan Law walkout and Jacob regularly reports on the racial disparity in job numbers. Ok, so we're probably entitled to some consideration as press, right? What about a blog of original poetry that occasionally interprets old dusty poetry tomes from her local library? You get the point. Maybe at some point, you just say "enough is enough" but that point is somewhat arbitrary, and for that matter, maybe no point is right.
I concluded in that last post that the law needs to concern itself with being press as an action rather than a status. What the FEC did in granting Colbert his narrow media exemption for his show was make sure the question doesn't get to a court. Maybe I should start a Super-PAC as a blogger and ask for one. That seems to be the next step in making the law confront the question.
