Media Center

Even for this craven FCC majority, today’s vote to bless more media consolidation represents an awful new low. The FCC just wiped away time-tested and common sense safeguards that promote vibrant local media by ensuring voters have access to competing sources of news. By blessing consolidation this majority has ensured newsroom redundancy, meaning fewer working journalists to hold the powerful to account. And if that were not enough, let Big Broadcast get even bigger means cable customers nationwide will pay higher bills.

Americans expect and deserve to know who is bankrolling the political ads that follow them around the internet. In the wake of revelations about Russian use of internet ads to sway the 2016 presidential race, Common Cause and 17,945 members and supporters made that expectation very clear to the FEC, filing comments with the agency last week. In total, more than 150,000 Americans spoke out in comments and petitions with the agency—an FEC rulemaking record.

The American people do not expect that their charitable contributions will be used for partisan political ends. The tax bill amendment offered by Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX) and passed on a party-line vote expands the bill’s previous rollback of the Johnson Amendment – buried more than 400 pages into the legislation – to now allow all charities to enter partisan politics, including well-funded front groups like the American Legislative Exchange Commission (ALEC). This takes the bill beyond just a massive giveaway to the nation’s billionaire class to now allow wealthy special interests to manipulate the charitable sector for partisan political ends, all with a subsidy from American taxpayers.

As if further proof was needed, the lawsuit filed today by Maine Secretary of State Matt Dunlap removes a shred of legitimacy the Pence-Kobach Commission has tried to cling to since its creation.

Today, Common Cause and 17,945 members and supporters filed formal comments urging the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to open a rulemaking to update its rules by requiring online political advertisements to include “paid for by” information just like TV, radio and print ads.

The Wisconsin Legislature’s vote yesterday to call a constitutional convention under Article V leaves the nation in a perilous position, just six states shy of calling a convention that could lead to the rewrite of the U.S. Constitution.