FEC Chair Scott Thomas is speaking now at the IPDI conference lunch, and he’s started out by saying how he’s here as a “pooper-scooper” to pick up after the “load” of “FECal matter” (his pun) dropped by his esteemed colleague, Bradley Smith.
He says that the commission didn’t take enough time to distinguish carefully when it adopted a “blunderbuss” exemption for all public communication online, with no distinction between a citizen-volunteer blogger at home and a paid professional with a honed message working in coordination with candidates or parties.
Surely there will be some consideration of regulating paid party and corporate/labor political advertising on the Internet, now. On the other extreme, he doubts there will be any interest in touching what volunteers do from their homes in coordination with campaigns.
As for bloggers, there are some cute questions, he says. If you work from home, you’ll free from rules. But while people being paid to run political blogads could say they’re commercial vendors, when you get to people being paid for favorable postings about campaigns, he says that starts to drift from being a commercial vendor and a blogger needing to register as a political committee (a group that raises or spends more than $1K to influence a federal election).
So far no mention of the media exemption for bloggers at all. Oops, he just brought it up–noting that the campus had offered him security for the speech. “I can’t wait to see the letter,” he says. The media exemption inquiry gets into the question of what is a periodical, what is news content, etc. He wants to extend press freedom without allowed “prohibited spending” to creep in.
He’s done…Hopefully the full text of his speech will be posted on the FEC site, for closer analysis.