Campaign Desk, Swing States Project — April 10, 2012 04:46 PM
A wealth of watchdog sites make campaign-finance data accessible, easy to work with
By Mary
Winter
COLORADO—Edwin Bender knows the value of a good follow-the-money story.
Bender is the executive director of the National Institute on Money in State
Politics and its website, named—appropriately enough—Followthemoney.org. He’s
also someone with a particular interest in prison-privatization proposals, and a
particular suspicion, honed over more
than a decade, about the role political donations play in encouraging
elected officials to embrace privatization.
So Bender was paying close attention in February, when lawmakers in Florida
narrowly killed a controversial, multi-million-dollar bid to
privatize state prisons. The bill failed because a group of rogue Republicans
defected from a privatization push led by Gov. Rick Scott and state Senate
President Mike Haridopolos.
But it also failed in part, Bender believes, because the media followed the
money. The Palm Beach Post and The Huffington Post (also here) were among news organizations reporting that private
prison companies had poured at least $1.8 million into Florida campaigns, mostly
Republican, over the past three election cycles—including $35,000 to Haridopolos
and $25,000 to Scott’s inaugural ball in 2011.
Huffington Post writer Chris Kirkham said that shortly before his Feb. 1
article appeared, he read an analysis by the institute documenting campaign
contributions during the 2010 cycle. Kirkham contacted Bender, who walked him
through the data on the institute’s website. “You could look at contributions by
industry, by state, and by election cycle,” said Kirkham. “You could see that
Florida had been a real target of donations for the private prison
industry.”
While no one suggested a quid pro quo, the story is a textbook illustration
of how money buys access to those who set public policy, Bender says. It’s also
a good example of how strong coverage of campaign finance can make arcane data
compelling and relevant; in this case, the governor and Senate president
appeared to be “buying the company line—hook, line and sinker,” Bender said.
And it’s an example, too, of the value of the expansive public-oriented
information ecosystem that has emerged to help tackle the money-in-politics
story. As campaign finance becomes an ever-trickier minefield of legalese, gray
areas, hair-splitting distinctions and moving parts—and as it becomes ever more
central to the story of politics—reporters can turn to a wealth of watchdog
sites where researchers gather, analyze, and post reams of data about state and
federal elected officials.
In addition to Followthemoney.org, these sites include the Center for
Responsive Politics’ Opensecrets.org, Maplight.org, and a range of projects sustained by the Sunlight Foundation
(which has funded some of CJR’s reporting on transparency). Other valuable
resources include Democracy
21, the Campaign
Legal Center, and Votesmart.org, which posts lawmakers’ resumes, voting records,
and issue positions.
These sites aren’t magic; they can’t expose “dark
money” or remake the post-Citizens United, post-super PAC legal landscape.
And knowing how to navigate them isn’t a substitute for independent expertise in
this area.
But many of the watchdog sites provide valuable original reporting and useful
resource guides, along the lines of what appears in accountability-minded news
organizations like ProPublica.
And one of these sites’ greatest virtues is that they make campaign-finance
data, at both the state and federal levels, readily accessible and easy to work
with. Want to know, for example, which Senate race has seen the most spending by
outside super PACs to date in this cycle? Click here, and you’ll see it’s Nebraska’s. Click here and you’ll see which groups are doing the spending. By
contrast, official government sites are often still clunky enough to frustrate
non-expert reporters and deter even interested members of the public.
(A case in point about those official sites: Four weeks ago, I logged onto
the Colorado Secretary of State’s campaign finance disclosure website and was thwarted right out
the gate. Clicking “User Instructions” landed me at a page that read, “Firefox
doesn’t know how to open this address, because the protocol (mms) isn’t
associated with any program.” Even my computer-savvy, post-grad son couldn’t
help. When I visited the site again in late March, I found several promising
features, including “TRACER Home Page Tour” and “Search Complaints,” but none of
the links worked. They didn’t work for my son, either. He said the site may only
support Internet Explorer, and suggested I call the secretary’s office in the
morning.)
As newsrooms around the country set their sights on political money, the data
that these sites are gathering—and the expertise behind it—has helped facilitate
coverage. According to Bender, reporters from major newspapers across the
country—from The New York Times and The Washington Post to The
Miami Herald and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution—regularly use
Followthemoney.org.
Sometimes, the flow of knowledge is even more direct. Dave Levinthal, who
formerly worked for Opensecrets.org, is now part of a team of five reporters who
cover campaign finance, political influence, and lobbying full-time for
Politico. Levinthal notes that his current employer is just one of the news
outlets that has redoubled its efforts to cover the money story.
“That speaks to the amount of interest news organizations have because so
many people are interested in the issues and are concerned about the issues or
want to make sense of the issues,” he said. “What we’re seeing is new and often
very innovative—coming from some of the usual suspects, the legacy media
organizations, but also a lot of new ones like Politico, which started five
years ago.”
For all the journalistic activity at specialty sites and major publications,
though, the coverage of political money often seems to fall short at smaller
media outlets, such as regional newspapers. It’s not that the story goes
uncovered—every respectable paper reports on latest fundraising numbers after
the filing deadlines pass, and attempts periodic big-deal investigations. Even
at mid-sized publications, there are probably more column inches (or screen
pixels) devoted to campaign finance than there once were.
But the coverage often misses simple opportunities to explore connections
between policies and political giving, to present fund-raising numbers in
non-horse race terms, or to point readers on the way to exploring this
information themselves. As a result, it doesn’t rise to the standard this story
demands.
Consider a few items from The Denver Post, my hometown paper and
former employer. In February, the Post reported on U.S. Rep. Douglas
Lamborn’s votes on two separate energy bills. One of the measures, which Lamborn sponsored, called for
expanding oil-shale exploration on federal land in Colorado; that bill was
blasted by both environmentalists and many government officials in the western
half of the state. The other bill called for extending a wind energy tax credit,
and Lamborn was the lone “no” vote among Colorado’s nine-person delegation.
With a few clicks at Opensecrets.org, a reporter would have found that oil
and gas
has been the top industry donor to Lamborn’s campaign committee, giving him $21,750 so far. It’s not a huge sum, and it doesn’t mean the industry is “buying” Lamborn’s vote. (It makes more sense to see the industry donors as trying to help a friendly politician keep his seat.) It’s also not exactly “news.” But it is a bit of context that sheds light on how laws are shaped—and how the people shaping the laws are supported.
has been the top industry donor to Lamborn’s campaign committee, giving him $21,750 so far. It’s not a huge sum, and it doesn’t mean the industry is “buying” Lamborn’s vote. (It makes more sense to see the industry donors as trying to help a friendly politician keep his seat.) It’s also not exactly “news.” But it is a bit of context that sheds light on how laws are shaped—and how the people shaping the laws are supported.
Or consider this Feb. 1 post about fundraising by candidates for Congress.
It’s good to have this information promptly reported when the data becomes
available. But the frame here is strictly horse-race: how much a candidate
raised, how much his or her opponent raised, how much cash the campaign has on
hand. There’s no sense of where the money is coming from, and no attempt to
point readers to where that information might be found.
Adding in these details wouldn’t have made the blog post a deep investigative
dive, and wouldn’t have eliminated the need for long-term pieces (which the
Post does take on). But it would have been a small step toward
improving readers’ understanding of the routine operation of money in
politics—and small steps, taken often enough, can carry you a long way.
There are also self-interested reasons for local newspapers (and TV stations)
to shift their coverage in this direction. The Internet has made it possible for
niche publications like Politico to reach a national audience, and for
data-miners and watchdogs to reach readers directly. In the competition for a
deeply-engaged political audience, few regional outlets can match the obsessive
focus of those specialty sources.
What even strapped regional publications might do as a matter of course,
though, is take advantage of the campaign finance work the specialty sites have
already done, and distill the bits of information that are most pertinent to
their readers—while also showing readers how they can seek out the data
themselves. That approach would mark a bid for relevance among politics junkies,
while also helping to open doors for more casual readers.
So what, exactly, might that look like? I’ll offer some specific suggestions
in my next post.
Source: Columbia Journalism Review
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