Presidential Auction 2004

They're public airwaves. As a public service, when election times roll around, all candidates for office, every political issue on a ballot, should have an equal and allotted time, provided free of charge for advertising, and no paid advertising beyond that allotted time should be permitted.

Otherwise, you see exactly what's happening. The media chooses your candidates for you.

MediaChannel/Media Tenor analysis of network coverage in January shows that anointed contestants John Kerry, Howard Dean, Wesley Clark and John Edwards received 93.8 percent of Democratic candidate coverage by CBS, NBC and ABC's nightly newscasts. Candidates Al Sharpton, Joe Lieberman and Dennis Kucinich, on the other hand, garnered a cumulative 6.2 percent of coverage in January.

Back-of-the-pack candidates vying for more exposure in the media mix, must turn to local affiliates to get their messages across to voters. But these broadcast outlets are doing little to help. In the 2002 mid term elections, local television stations jacked up the prices of political ads by an average of more than 50 percent, according to a report by the Alliance for Better Campaigns. The biggest culprit of them all was Fox affiliate KTXL in Sacramento, which hiked advertising rates more than 250 percent prior to the 2002 elections.

McGehee cites these abuses despite a "lowest unit charge" federal statute enacted in 1971 to prevent such pre-election profiteering. Under the statute, broadcasters -- who pay nothing for their licenses to use publicly owned airwaves -- are prohibited from charging candidates more for ad time than they charge their high volume, year-round advertisers. This provision was designed to ensure that candidates are not exploited by market forces for their need to advertise in a compressed period of time prior to an election.  article

But nobody's stopping them?

So what do you think Double-face will do with his $200 million or so in campaign funds come summer? He's already getting tax-paid commercials.

....hey, do what you want....you will anyway.