MEDIA REFORM, INITIATIVE PROCESS & CLEAN ELECTIONS TOP COMMON CAUSE AGENDA

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By Miriam Raftery March 16, 2009 (San Diego)--At a San Diego fundraising dinner for Common Cause last week, speakers addressed the latest priorities taken on by the nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to protecting the public interest and holding government accountable to the voters. Media reform (including a conference this weekend in Southern California), clean elections and revising the California initiative process top the list of priorities for local Common Cause leaders.

 

Lori Saldana of San Diego, Speaker Pro Tem of the California Assembly, spoke on the prolonged budget battle in Sacramento. “What we saw was the breakdown of government,” she said, adding that the Legislature remains highly polarized. She noted that California is one of only three states (along with Arkansas and Rhode Island) to require a super majority instead of a simple majority to pass a budget bill. She praised Common Cause for supporting AB 583, the Clean Elections Campaign bill signed by Governor Schwarzenegger. The bill will place an initiative on the ballot in 2010 that would create a pilot program for public financing of candidates running for Secretary of State. The measure would be paid for through lobbyists’ registration fees.

 

“You wouldn’t believe the looks on the faces of the lobbyists in a committee meeting on the bill,” Saldana recalled. “They glowered and glared.” Public financing of campaigns in other states, such as Arizona, has resulted in a large increase in women winning elections. In addition, the number of minority candidates tripled. “Janet Napolitano was the first woman elected as a governor with public funds. Now she is Homeland Security Director,” Saldana noted. “We want more people of diverse backgrounds to run for office. Not once in our city’s history has a woman of color been elected to City Council.”

 

Women leaders are more apt to introduce legislation to help people, such as bills to improve healthcare, education, and social services, Saldana said. But she added, “In the California Legislature, 33 of 120 members are women. We’ve lost ground.” Glenn Smith, a law professor, spoke on Common Cause efforts to reform the ballot initiative process. Currently, there is virtually no cost to place an initiative on the ballot in California, and voters are bombarded with conflicting and often misleading information.

 

“We’re proposing the idea that you ought to have to write an intent statement on how an initiative would change the law,” he said. The plan would include hearings at which groups such as Common Cause could provide comments, followed by a response period. The concept is modeled after the existing rulemaking process for legislative measures.

 

Media reform is another issue that Common Cause is tackling. Smith noted that 1,700 journalists were laid off in the U.S. in 2007, with even more lay-offs in 2008. “2009 will be worse still,” he observed. “Licensing no longer requires stations to act in the public interest.” Six companies now control the broadcast media in the U.S.” down from 91 companies a few years ago.

 

In San Diego, Clear Channel, which is owned by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s investment group, now owns about half of all stations on the airways. Limits were changed in 1996. Formerly one company could not own more than 40 stations.

 

“Clear Channels owns 1,400,” Smith said.

 

Conservative talk radio has replaced country-Western music as the most popular radio format in America, according to Mike Thaller, director of communications for the San Diego Democratic Party and producer of the HBO special, “Right America Feeling Wrong.” Today, 1,880 of the 2,064 talk shows in the U.S are conservative” a whopping 91%. Of the remaining 8%, some are liberal but many are “neutral” such as medical talk programs.

 

“The quality of American journalism has depreciated because talk radio has replaced news,” said Thaller (photo, right, with Francine Busby at the Common Cause event). “We’ve lost journalism” and we’ve lost localism,” he said, noting that Clear Channel recently axed both liberal and conservative hosts locally and that “local” news is now broadcast from Texas. Moreover, less than 8% of radio stations in America are owned by people of color. Women own less than 3% of newspapers. Public radio and TV, NPR and PBS, have lost funding in recent years.

 

“We’re losing our free press. We’re losing fair and balanced news, investigative journalism, and we are losing democracy itself,” Thaller concluded. Common Cause is sponsoring a Media Reform regional summit on March 21st at Occidental College in the Los Angeles area to address these issues. Meanwhile, Thaller urged concerned citizens to contact Congress and ask that licensing include news in the public interest. “One station wrote `broadcast Padre games’ on its application as an example of its public interest programming,’” he noted. Thaller sees hope in Internet news sources including internet radio, which he predicts will probably be available for cars in the near future. He warned about efforts by large corporations to control Internet access and warned, “We need to keep the Internet free.”


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