Hot on the heels of our discussion last week about the future of journalism comes this article from the Sunday Seattle Times:

Regulators: is blogging lobbying?

The upshot, online political activists could be required to publicly disclose their finances.  However, non-traditional journalistic bloggers, whose topics range from news reporting to advocacy, and even fundraising, may face the same requirements.

True to their own journalistic integrity the Times interviewed people on both sides of the issue.

For example, blogger David Goldstein thinks an important part of his “hobby” is to raise the level of public debate and urge people to get involved.  He points our that newspaper editorialists and radio commentators do the same thing, but they’re exempt from the Public Disclosure law.

On the other hand, Lobbyist Steve Gano recognizes the allure of the internet for advocacy groups.  If they’re not regulated online, what’s going to stop registered state lobbyists from going to the internet to lobby?

According to the article it is the changing definitions of journalism that is at the heart of the issue.  However, Doug Ellis, assistant Director of the Public Disclosure Commission thinks it is a non-issue noting that “bloggers who perform a journalistic function” will probably be exempt since they are exempt from current campaign finance laws.

It could be a non-issue for another reason however.  Authors Marie Hojnacki and David Kimball studied the effects of campaign contributions by PAC’s and lobbyists representing PAC’s.  In their article “PAC Contributions and Lobbying Contacts in Congressional Committees” published in Politcal Research Quarterly in March of 2001, Hojnacki and Kimball focused on campaign contributions from PAC’s and their lobbyists to see if there was any correlation between dollar amounts and access to members of congress or their staff.

Using the 104th Congress and the four issues of product liability, financial services deregulation, crime control and criminal justice reform, and grazing use and management the authors:

“selected 241 groups for the product liability issue, 119 groups for financial services deregulation, 160 groups for anticrime proposals, and 128 groups for grazing use and management”

All 648 groups were asked to participate but in the end only 70 indicated they were active on the issues.  The authors acknowledge that this is a small sample size but still suggest that the results are significant.

And their conclusion… money doesn’t give the PAC’s an advantage:

“Overall, we see little reason to be surprised that opportunities for donor groups to meet directly with legislators are not facilitated by the relatively small sums of money individual PACs can give to legislators. For one, contributions are only one of an array of different advocacy activities in which groups engage in order to affect legislative behavior and outcomes. Second, given the rising costs of campaigning, any one PAC probably has little reason to believe that its contribution will stand out from all the others a legislator receives. Interest groups seeking access to a wide audience in Congress, then, will be most successful when they do the difficult work of organizing a network of supporters in a substantial number of legislative districts”

This study focused on traditional lobbying efforts and didn’t include information about online lobbying.  However, at the root of the public disclosure laws is the belief that lobbyists are using money to influence lawmakers inappropriately.  This study shows that organization of support seems to be the key factor.  In that case maybe it would be better to ask the lobbyists and the PAC’s to publicly disclose the names of their members instead.

Oh wait maybe that’s a worse idea.

Maury