So last week the GOP-led House of Representatives voted to defund NPR, in a move that is all but certain to die in the Democratic Senate.
The story isn’t really over though.
James O’Keefe, the pimply-faced provocateur who engineered the sting that cost NPR CEO Vivian Schiller her job the week before last, has collected more than his share of scalps. His undercover scam on an Acorn office essentially helped drive that activist group out of business. And the sting on NPR’s (now ex-) fundraising guy, Ron Schiller, led to Vivian Schiller’s (no relation) forced resignation a day after it became public. (Ron Schiller was recorded appearing to disparage conservatives while speaking to a phony would-be donor purporting to represent fictional Arab interests.)
But a couple of things that came to my attention Monday brought to mind another “scalp” that the right wing (though not, in this case, O’Keefe) collected, only to have it snatched back. I’m speaking of the infamous Shirley Sherrod matter, in which blogger Andrew Breitbard posted a doctored tape of a speech she gave to impute racist thoughts and actions to her that, in fact, were exactly the opposite of the point of the speech. Sherrod was hastily fired by the Obama administration, only to be offered her job back as the perfidy of the Breitbard post came to light. (She declined.)
This weekend, NPR’s On the Media broadcast an interview with O’Keefe in which Bob Garfield lays out quite completely the ways in which the O’Keefe’s Schiller recording distorts Schiller outright.
Michael Rosenblum, a New York new media entrepreneur (and, full disclosure alert, a graduate school classmate of mine), offered his own take as well in which says that “NPR was screwed in the edit.”
(Irony alert: Conservative broadcaster Glenn Beck lines up with NPR on this one; in fact, the Beck-affiliated website The Blaze may have been first to this story.)
(Less-interesting irony alert: O’Keefe refused to be recorded at a Tea Party event earlier this month.)
With what’s coming to light, it’s hard to avoid asking whether NPR acted as precipitously toward Vivian Schiller as the Agriculture Department did toward Shirley Sherrod.
I have a note in to folks at NPR for their thoughts on this question. WUWM’s Dave Edwards, who chairs the network’s board of directors, is out of the country and not available, but if I hear back from anyone else, I’ll update this item.
(Meanwhile, see more of On The Media’s coverage of NPR v. O’Keefe, including Ira Glass’s rebuttal to the charges of “liberal bias,” here and here.)
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About that “union campaign money”
It’s become a standard line in many news stories and commentaries about the role of public employee unions in the campaign process: The notion that union dues money gets spent on political campaigns.
For supporters of Gov. Scott Walker‘s bill stripping most collective bargaining rights from public employees – and also making it far more difficult for public employee unions to collect dues – that supposed relationship further justifies those measures.
Writing a couple of weeks ago in Newsweek, GOP media consultant Mark McKinnon asserted: “Big money from public unions, collected through mandatory dues, and funded entirely by the taxpayer, is then redistributed as campaign cash to help elect the politicians who are then supposed to represent the taxpayers in negotiations with those same unions.”
About the same time, the Journal Sentinel printed a story provided by the Center for Public Integrity that stated that money from “Union treasuries–filled by dues paid by union members … provides millions of dollars for Democratic causes and candidates.”
But statements like those, and countless other variations in daily coverage, editorials and Internet comments, misdirect the discussion and mislead readers.
You’d never know that, under both federal and state law, no union, public or private, can donate members’ dues money to political campaigns. Wisconsin is one of 15 states that outlaw union and corporate direct contributions to candidates. (The National Conference of State Legislatures has a handy chart on state-by-state laws here [PDF].)
“Wisconsin prohibits unions from writing a check from their general treasury funds–dues money — to a particular candidate, and so does the federal law,” Justin Levitt, an expert on election law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, told me in a phone interview. “They can, just like corporations can, and just like any group of citizens can, form a political action committee, a PAC. But that’s very different from dues money. Those are voluntary contributions that head into PAC accounts.”
Now some of this gets very complicated. There’s more than one kind of “political money.” Some goes to candidates, other goes to independent organizations that may run ads for or against candidates, and some goes to put “boots on the ground”: organizing phone banks and door-to-door canvasing to get out the vote. And the rules are different for each, with dues money permitted in some contexts and not in others.
It’s also worth noting that legally enforced provisions exist enabling union members to obtain refunds for that portion of their dues that is spent on political activities (again, not donations) with which they disagree, as Rick Badger of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees District Council 40 pointed out to me last week.
Yet even the Center for Public Integrity’s phrasing on page 1 of the Journal Sentinel, although technically accurate, can easily lead to a false impression of dues money going directly to political candidates.
Such confusion is pretty common, says Levitt. Routine news stories on campaign finances often simply describe donations as coming from “unions” when in fact they come from a voluntarily funded union PAC. The same thing happens with personal donations that come from union officials or union staff members. Campaign finance disclosure forms require the donor’s employer to be listed; if that employer is a union, then it looks like “union money.”
The same mis-reading occurs on the corporate side. Corporations can’t give money from their own treasuries directly to candidates, either nationally or in Wisconsin. Instead, corporate PACs collect donations from employees who choose to take part. Meanwhile, donations from individual corporate employees are typically tied to the employer thanks to the disclosure form.
“I’ve seen an awful lot of conflation calling individual contributions and PAC contributions as money taken from the treasury” of the union or the corporation, Levitt says. “I don’t like it, but I understand it.”
Right now, some big Wisconsin businesses – notably M&I Bank – are seeing the impact of that conflation up close, as anti-Walker troops organize to boycott them on account of donations some of executives and employees have made to Walker’s campaign.
And with last year’s Supreme Court ruling in the Citizens United case that gave corporations and unions alike far greater leeway to pay for advertising for or against candidates, it will only get muddier. (I spotted one liberal blog entry — I am not going to link to it — that falsely claimed M&I donated directly to Walker thanks to Citizens United.)
Lost in all this confusion is something that Wisconsin Democracy Campaign pointed out last week: For all the outrage among Walker’s supporters and perhaps Republicans generally about union money supporting Democrats, campaign donations from business interests outpace those from labor by 12 to 1 — and most of that goes to Republicans.
That story hasn’t gotten any coverage in the Journal Sentinel, or elsewhere in print. The Democracy Campaign’s director, Mike McCabe, tells me that radio picked up on it; print media have made “some inquiries,” he says, “but haven’t seen any stories yet.”
(Milwaukee News Buzz also covered it.)
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What really is going on across the lake in Michigan?
A series of new proposals giving the state broad powers to intervene in the financial and labor affairs of “failing” schools and cities doesn’t seem to have gotten much coverage in the mainstream press outside of Michigan.
I searched the New York Times and found just this short AP squib. The online news site AnnArbor.com (the descendent of that city’s daily paper, the Ann Arbor News, which stopped printing in 2009), published this story about a Democratic legislator’s defense of the bill. At the Washington Post I found a longer AP story and this commentary.
Yet in the liberal/progressive blogosphere, there has been extensive coverage that puts a very dark cast on the law. Rachel Maddow at MSNBC has gotten into the topic as well, recently interviewing Naomi Klein, who sees it as an example of the practices she outlines in her book The Shock Doctrine. The Klein thesis: An alliance of corporate moneyed interests and conservative politics has consistently worked over decades to capitalize on political, social and economic instability to implement policies, mostly privatizing public institutions, that wouldn’t pass muster with voters under normal circumstances.
Is she right? I frankly don’t know (and I haven’t yet read the Klein book, although I’ve been aware of it for some time). It’s a provocative thesis, but is there really any substance there? Or is it just conspiracy mongering? Or somewhere in between?
Whether Klein is right or wrong, it seems there’s a much bigger story to tell there than we’ve seen so far.
Your thoughts, as always, are welcome in the comments below or via email to Pressroom@milwaukeemagazine.com.
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