TV stations illegally give credit to congressman's campaign

When you see stories like this, you almost wish you hadn't dragged yourself out of bed in the morning.

Dave Reichert is a long-embattled right-wing congressman from the Seattle area who's now trailing in the polls. Reichert is known for storming out of debates and gloating about getting a school bus driver fired for opposing Bush.

Now it's been discovered that Reichert - who only has about $500,000 in campaign cash on hand - has purchased $1,100,000 of ad time on Seattle's 4 leading TV network affiliates.

How is that possible? How can you spend $600,000 more than you have? Records don't show Reichert to be a self-financing candidate, so he couldn't be paying for the ads out of his own pocket.

Clearly, the TV stations are extending credit to the beleaguered lawmaker. This isn't just dumb. (It seems foolish for a station to give credit to political campaigns that might not even be around after Election Day.) This is illegal.

Two of the stations have provided a weak excuse: They claim Reichert's campaign isn't getting the credit, but his media buyer, Media Plus, is. It turns out though that Media Plus boasts about influencing TV news content with ad dollars, which is bad enough on its own. It looks like Reichert plans on paying the TV stations later with corporate PAC dollars.

The Federal Election Commission has already made it perfectly clear that it's illegal for candidates to get a loan from TV stations in this manner.

If the FEC doesn't like it, what do you think the FCC would say? The stations should be in enough trouble already for news content being influenced by Media Plus. Maybe the FCC should be worrying about this instead of raiding 1-watt stations that don't harm anyone.

(Source: http://www.openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=9255)