Thinking about political free speech for organizations

I just read "Money Unlimited: How Chief Justice John Roberts orchestrated the Citizens United decision" by Jeffrey Toobin in The New Yorker. It got me to thinking:

Whose Political Opinions are Expressed by Corporations

Organizations don't speak. Sometimes a person is designated to speak for an organization, but organizations don't have the physical equipment to speak.

More importantly is the way organizations make decisions. The owners of an organization are in theory its stock holders, and if an organization were to express opinions they ought to be the opinions of its stock holders. While there are stock holder meetings, many of the stock holders of large corporations are themselves other organizations -- banks, pension funds, mutual funds, etc. There is no practical way to ascertain the political preferences of the people who own large corporations.

In fact, small groups of people make decisions as to the advertisements that corporations pay for. Thus a small group of people is using money belonging to the corporation's stock holders to pay for advertisements promoting political views of that small group rather than the documented opinion of the stock holders. I can not imagine that the corporate charters give that power to the management of corporations, nor that the ultimate people whose money forms the capital of the corporation are informed that their money will be used in that way.

The question is not whether the rights of corporations as "legal persons" have the right to political speech, but whether the management of a corporation has the right to determine the content of political speech of the corporation that they manage.

We generally agree that foreign nationals do not have the right to advertise to influence American elections. Thus foreign owned corporations should not have that right either. How about corporations chartered in the United States with foreign owners? What percentage of the capital in a corporation could come from foreign investors before the corporation should not be allowed to influence an American election?

Indeed, I have made the argument that decisions on political advertisements funded by corporations are actually made by small groups of people in the corporate management. What if some of all of those people are not American citizens?

Do we want the Federal Elections Committee to try to make such fine distinctions and to try to ascertain whether corporations meet the criteria to be allowed political advertisements? I think not.

Balance in the Media

The Supreme Court decided in the past that the government had the right to assure balanced coverage of controversial issues in the media, accepting a "Fairness Doctrine" from the FCC. While the FCC no longer enforces a fairness doctrine, the government might do so.

The fairness doctrine was imposed in part because the broadcast spectrum is owned by the people and managed by the people to serve the public interest. In the second half of the 20th century, most people got their information from from radio or television, and there was a potential danger that if those media presented a biased coverage of the issues before voters, then the voters would not have the information necessary to vote wisely.

Similarly, the FCC has enforced a newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership rule. The rule again establishes the principle that in order to assure that voters have balanced information on issues before them the government can regulate the media.

Today people have vastly more access to information via cable television and the Internet than they had when those principles were established. Faced with a virtual flood of information, the question is to what do viewers attend? It is possible that the government has a legitimate role in encouraging the public to attend to a balanced set of views on key issues. I would hold that such is at least worthy of consideration.

Money is now used to buy attention through advertisements in newspapers, radio, television, email, social media, search engines, etc. Indeed, money is used to buy "news channels" such as Fox News and MSNBC that present conservative and liberal views of issues respectively.

It would seem to me that the government has a potential role in assuring that the funding for political advertising is not so heavily directed towards one point of view that voters are unlikely to attend appropriately to other legitimate views on the issues. I would think limitations on the funding of political advertisement by Super PACs, corporations and non-profits be considered in this respect.