The NPR Politics Podcast - How TV Ad Lies And Private Money Shape U.S. Elections

Episode Date: April 1, 2022

The Federal Communications Commission has few regulations over what candidates can say in their advertisements, though private broadcasters and internet platforms can impose more stringent rules. The result is thousands of the political advertising voters see can include lies and outlandish claims.And some election watchers say the private money was key to a smooth general election process in 2020, in the midst of the pandemic. Now, though, some states have begun to outlaw those outside donations in an effort to prevent corruption. Will Congress act to make up the funding gap?This episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro, and voting reporter Miles Parks.Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is DJ Bradley in Cleveland, Ohio. I just dropped off the last Afghan family at their new home that had stayed with me while looking for permanent housing. This podcast was recorded at 1221 p.m. on April 1st. Things may have changed by the time you hear it, but one thing that won't is the strong and lasting friendships we've made. It has been such a blessing to help welcome them into their new homes here in America. Okay, here's the show.

How cool is that? Yeah, super grateful. Super grateful for the work you're doing, DJ. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And today is April Fool's Day, but we have zero April Fool's Day elements in this podcast, so you can trust what we tell you coming up. On today's Roundup, we have reporting on two different aspects on the election experience, both the physical act of voting and who can pay for election administration,

and those paid ads that if you live in a swing district, you will be so sick of that you want to scream by the time we get to this election day coming in November. So, Domenico, let's start with you. You have a story this week that asks a pretty simple question. Can candidates lie in their paid advertising? Yeah. And, you know, look, I was wanting to take this on because, like you said, people are going to start getting those ads. And there's estimated to be some $9 billion in ads spent this cycle. And they're just about to ramp up. And in answer to your question, let me let Tom Wheeler speak to that.

He was the federal communications chairman under former President Barack Obama. Unfortunately, you're allowed to lie. When it comes to candidates, candidates can basically say whatever they want unfiltered on local broadcast channels like CBS, ABC, NBC, local news channels that you watch. Candidates there can say whatever they want. Well, I'm thinking about these ads and they always have like, I'm Jim so-and-so and I endorse this message. So basically they have to stand there and say, I endorse this thing, but it may include a lie. Yeah. You know, that disclosure is required by the Federal Election Commission, the FEC, but they're not required in any way to say what they, you know, whether or not the things that they say in those ads are truthful.

They have no reason, there's no need to back up what they have to say in these ads. The ad that sparked this for me was listening to Kerry Lake, who's a Republican running for governor in Arizona. And Carrie Lake talks about how former President Trump won in 2020, even though that's, of course, a lie. If you're watching this ad right now, it means you're in the middle of watching a fake news program. You know how to know it's fake? Because they won't even cover the biggest story out there, the rigged election of 2020. She's saying that the media is not going to be looking into or isn't looking into the fact that Trump won in 2020 when he lost. And court after court, audit after audit has proved that. We've said that time and again on this podcast. So it made me want to go down this rabbit hole and sort of draw the lines of delineation on what's allowed and what's not.

So what about like the platforms and the individual stations, Domenico? Because I do remember a couple of years ago, CNN rejected a couple ads from former President Trump, I believe related to the first impeachment because they contained, you know, falsehoods, inaccuracies. What role do the stations have in kind of being – are they allowed to kind of decide whether these untrue ads, even if they are legal, whether they air them or not? Well, what people need to understand is that there's a broad spectrum of television and what came about in the mid-20th century for what we all see. NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, your local Fox channel, those are broadcast channels. And on those channels, the candidates can say essentially what they want on those channels. Now, when it comes to CNN or Fox News or MSNBC, those are cable channels. And cable channels and social media platforms have wider latitude to do their own filtering. So they can say, no, we're not going to run that because

there's a falsehood in that. But the local channels are not allowed to do that. And the candidates aren't required to disclose where they got their facts in those. Now, another line of delineation here is that the local broadcast channels can reject ads that are from all those outside groups we talk about. You know, groups like Priorities USA, you know, the Democratic super PAC on the left. If they were to say something in an ad that a local channel didn't want to run, that they contested as being false or something like that, they could say, no, we find that offensive, or we don't want to to run it and they have the power to do that. But they don't have the power to do that with candidates themselves even though cable channels do.

OK. So let's say I was selling a pillow or I don't know. Let's say I'm selling a product and I have an ad for my product that is untrue. I am making false claims in my advertisement about my product. Like, I'm probably not allowed to do that as an advertiser, but as a commercial advertiser. But what it sounds like what you're saying is that the rules are different for political speech. Absolutely. And another F space C organization in the government, the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, are the ones who regulate commercial advertising. And they say that you can't have false speech in a commercial ad. That's different than in politics.

Obviously, politicians make the rules. So you could potentially see how that would have been possible that maybe they don't want themselves to be censored. But there's a real First Amendment piece of this that even when you talk to people who are saying, you know, look, I don't like that they're that you're able to that candidates can just lie in their ads if they want to. But what's the line here? You know, how far does it go to be able to, you know, say, hey, you know, we're going to somehow regulate what your speech is. So, Domenico, are there ideas? I imagine people smarter than us have thought a lot about this.

Like what are some ideas about how the government could kind of act in this space. Yeah, I mean, there are a few people who have called for a neutral government regulator to, you know, basically be an arbiter of truth. That has made a lot of people nervous because they don't know how far that could go. But you start to look at the state level, and there are lots of states who have made attempts at this. And in Montana, I talked to a former state representative there, Kimberly Dudick, who's a Democrat and who tried to pass legislation that would require people to disclose, you know, essentially a citation on screen where they got their facts from. If you have a candidate saying, for example, that Biden was not lawfully elected and the

election was stolen, in my opinion, I believe that person should be required to justify that statement. What are they basing it on? And she said she did this because when she was running, she didn't know people could lie about her. Commercial advertising, they can't, you know, lead consumers down the wrong path and lie to them or commit fraud. So you would think that the same sort of wanting to protect voters and prevent fraud would apply to our elections.

Unfortunately, her law failed because Montana had a bipartisan piece of legislation that looks similar to this that went to the Montana State Supreme Court and was knocked down as being viewed as unconstitutional. So really a lot of frustration, even from people who are trying to, you know, do something to regulate this kind of thing. Yeah, since 2016, almost, it feels like we've been having the same conversation. And like, I don't, I'm not positive we've moved very far forward in getting towards like where that line should be. Yeah. All right. Well, we are going to take a quick break. And when we get back, Miles has some really interesting reporting on who can pay for election administration. And we're back. And I want to take you back in time to 2020, when even the idea of being able to pull off an election in the middle of a pandemic seemed,

I don't know, challenging. It was difficult to find election workers. All of a sudden, like three quarters of America suddenly wanted to vote by mail. And it created just a huge challenge for local elections officials. And it was also a financial challenge. And in the midst of that, there were donations that came in, a huge amount of money, hundreds of millions of dollars in private donations to help these local officials pull off these elections. But now some states are considering outlawing that private money in elections because there are concerns about where that money is coming from. So Miles, this is a story you've been reporting this week. So where were those donations used? Yeah, so just to take a step back a little bit,

like at the onset of the pandemic, it became very clear very quickly, you know, that was also primary season. And election officials realized that, oh, we didn't budget for having to go from 5% of voters voting by mail to 70% or 50%. And that added all of these costs. You know, they needed to buy hand sanitizer and maybe get new polling places or readjust their polling places to adjust for the pandemic. So the pandemic made elections a lot more expensive very quickly. Congress sent some money at the beginning of the pandemic, but did not send any money closer to the general election, which is where this private funding came in. There was a clear need. Election officials were of dollars to support election officials. This money went to, you know, buying more vote by mail equipment. In some cases, it went to paying election workers, you know, people to help people register and for people to basically just like man this massive election process. So it went to a bunch of different election administration things.

And this is the time where we give the disclaimer that Meta is not an NPR sponsor, but they do pay to license NPR content. Yeah, it's also worth noting that Zuckerberg, you know, while he was credited with giving all this money to help the 2020 election make it happen, he also has been criticized for the last five years for, you know, his platform being a place where a lot of the damaging democracy narratives have kind of flourished. You know, I'm trying to wrap my head around this a little bit because ordinarily with this kind of private money influence, you hear a lot from the left complaining about

groups like the Koch brothers, for example, who have weighed in pretty heavily in trying to influence legislation and even funding judicial races like local judge races. Is this a kind of similar thing, but from the other side, or is there more of a bipartisan piece to this? I think it's interesting because there is, I think, a bipartisan concern that this is not how elections should be funded. I think everyone involved, even Zuckerberg himself, agreed that the government should pay for voting functions. But if it doesn't, that's where he wanted to step in. But I should say there is an effort now across the country only in Republican led states to ban these sorts of donations. And this is something we've been tracking. More than a dozen states since 2020

have banned now private donations to elections offices saying voting officials can only use government money. So in a bunch of states across the South, the Midwest and some in the West, this won't be able to happen again. So this money wasn't meant to like explicitly influence the election. No. Or issues. Right. But like all things in 2020 related, right? Like it has become the source of conspiracy theorizing. So in all of these states where these donations are being banned, you hear Republican legislators basically saying this money gave Mark Zuckerberg some ability to interfere in the election. And there is no evidence that that's actually the case. But people like former President Trump see things like expanding vote by mail operations or, you know, having more people be able to get, you know, non English speakers voting information.

They see efforts like that that are that election officials see as voter access that don't benefit one party or the other, a lot of Republicans have said that was an effort by Zuckerberg to turn out Democratic voters, even though there's no evidence that that's the case. You said that these laws are largely being pushed forward in Republican states or by Republican legislatures. But is this a purely partisan thing? I mean, I can imagine lots of people not wanting Mark Zuckerberg to pay for the election. Yeah, I think if the laws were not being used to also push conspiracies around 2020, then there might be some potential for bipartisan buy-in. But at this point, they're so connected to bypassing the laws, trying to basically say there was something tainted about the 2020 election.

And Democratic lawmakers, Democrats across the country, obviously do not want to be a part of any legislation that even alludes to that being the case. So what are Republican solutions to this? I mean, you know, if there's a funding gap in the states and you need to have poll places open, is there a solution to cut down on the number of polling places? Well, I think that's the frustration from the people involved with these grants. I talked to Tiana Epps-Johnson, who runs this group called the Center for Tech and Civic Life, which is this nonprofit that helped Zuckerberg administer these donations all across the country. And what she said basically is

if you're going to ban these donations, then that needs to come with an influx of government funding as well, because the whole reason this problem exists in the first place is because elections traditionally over the last 10 years have gotten more expensive. But, you know, Congress and at the local level, there hasn't been an influx of funding. While legislatures have been taking up the issue of banning the ability to supplement election departments' budgets, they haven't at the same time made sure to address the underlying issue that made our work necessary in the first place. I have a really basic question for you, Miles, about this money. Elections are locally administered, right? But Congress needs to send money? elections are run at the local and state level. But the problem is we haven't seen that happen, right? And there is a huge kind of disparity in resources among the states on how much money is available to be budgeted. And so I think what election experts say is probably if you want

there to be a similar voting experience across the board, which I think most Americans want, you know, you don't want the voting experience for somebody in Idaho to be drastically different, ideally, than the voting experience of somebody in South Carolina for the same presidential election. And so if you want that to be the case, the most efficient route to do that might be to have some sort of kind of consistent annual base level funding from Congress that's kind of supplementing the local budgets. And, you know, I'm thinking back to precedent. There was, after the 2000 election went terribly badly, there was a lot of federal funding to try to improve election systems. But it sounds like it might be sort of boom and bust funding where it doesn't come through consistently. Exactly. And that's like a big problem for election officials

want to be able to plan, you know, years in advance. And they can't right now with the way Congress has basically been sending these one-off influxes of money, but they have no, they didn't send any in 2021. They sent some in 2020 and they sent a little bit this year in the most recent spending bill, which is really frustrating to election officials who want to have, they're like, if we're getting money from the federal government, we want to be able to plan on it and be able to use it efficiently. All right, let's take a quick break and then a palate cleanser. It's time for Can't Let It Go. And we're back. And it's time to end the show like we do every week with Can't Let It Go, the part of the pod where we talk about all the things from the week that we just can't stop talking about politics or otherwise. Miles.

I can never let go of giant ships getting stuck. I will continue being amazed and entertained every single time it happens. There's something satisfying about seeing something large not moving in a pandemic. You're not the only one stuck. Yeah. Well, so this week we have another giant boat stuck, which I have definitely spent multiple minutes watching the live stream of like tugboats trying to pull it out and do all this stuff. No, no movement yet. But the best part about this is that this most recent giant ship being stuck, it hits the dad joke part of my humor, which is the ship is called the Ever Forward.

And it's currently stuck in like a dozen feet of mud, just not moving after making a wrong turn out of Baltimore. And so I don't know. I just love it. Okay, so I got to ask, what is up with the Ever Company or whatever it is? It was the Ever Given, and now it's the Ever Forward. The Ever Taketh Away.

Yeah, it's the same company that operates both of the boats, the one that got stuck in the Suez Canal and this one. So I don't know. I don't want to put them on blast, but also I'm sure there is somebody working very hard for that company who feels really bad. Domenico, what can't you let go of? I cannot let go of Betty Reed Soskin.

Do you guys know her? I think I know where this is going. Ranger Betty, as she's known. She's the oldest active National Park Service ranger. She retired Thursday after 15 years of working on the job. But guess how old she is? She is 100 years old. Oh, my. 100 years old. She turned in September and she retired. And it just made me think she was 85 when she started this career. She was like, this retirement thing is getting boring.

I need a job for maybe like a year, 15 years later. Well, I love national parks and I love the Rangers. We always have conversations when I go into the parks and stuff. But it's like to me it's just a fresh reminder that no matter how old you are, you're never too old to start something new. And I think it's a really good reminder for all of us who might feel stuck, Miles, that you can always change and do something new. I believe that the park where she is a ranger is is the like a rosie the riveter uh park and she was certainly alive during world war ii and had a job and and i don't know that's like super cool super yeah um you know she was sharing stories of her life um and those other working women during world war ii at the

rosie the riveter world war ii home front Historic Park in Richmond. So, you know, this was a story in NBC Bay Area that I'm pulling from here. But, yeah, I mean, it's a really interesting story considering, you know, where we're at in the world. Having that institutional knowledge and understanding and some context is certainly useful, especially when I think a lot of people are going to the park for some, you know, serenity. Yeah. I just loved the stories of when my grandmother worked during World War II. It was the best. What can't you let go of, Tam? So what I cannot let go of is this show on Netflix called Is It Cake? Huh. What else would it be? Well, there are a number of episodes. It is hosted by Mikey Day, who is from Saturday Night Live.

Always a quirky, quirky dude. Quirky dude. And this is a quirky show. So it is a baking competition for people who have a very unique and highly specialized skill, which is making hyper realistic cakes. Oh, this is a bowling ball. And this is a cake. What? Cakes that look like shoes, cakes that look like purses, cakes that look like tacos. But can you eat it? Or is there just so much fondant that that's just for show? There is a theme in this show, and fondant.

Jokes about fondant are plentiful on this show. It's amazing, amazing stuff. I could never do it. So what they do is they have these stands where there are five items, and you have to figure out which one is cake and which one is not cake. Here's how this works. Only one of those cake stands is holding an actual cake. What is this, a cake? And then Mikey goes around with a knife trying to cut into things. And he has these comically large knives. And the judges are like 20 feet away. So everybody's trying to guess whether something is

cake and not cake from 20 feet away. And from 20 feet away, these things are hyper realistic. Up close, I think you can tell it's cake. But all I can say is Netflix, I would like to be a contestant on one of your baking failure shows. And if that is not possible, I would like to be a judge on a show like Is It of your baking failure shows. And if that is not possible, I would like to be a judge on a show like Is It Cake? I could judge. I feel like I just wanted to be in, I want to be in a pitch meeting for Is This Cake? And I feel like, I know, like, how does this get all the way here to where it's made? I feel like I get pitches killed all the time. And I'm like, this somehow like got all the way through this process. And not only that, but people love it. It is taking off.

It is one of the top shows on Netflix right now. And my four-year-old says, I want to watch. Is it cake? How would your four-year-old do as a judge? I mean, like he'd just smash everything. That's true. And you would find out if it is cake if you did that. All right.

That is a wrap for today. Our executive producer is Mathani Mathuri. Our editors are Eric McDaniel and Krishnadev Kalamar. Our producers are Lexi Schapittle and Elena Moore, thanks to Brandon Carter. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.