Last January, after the Supreme Court overturned the ban on corporations’ spending money on federal campaigns, the Times Editorial Board got angry.
Here’s some of what they wrote –
With a single, disastrous 5-to-4 ruling, the Supreme Court has thrust politics back to the robber-baron era of the 19th century…
The majority is deeply wrong on the law. Most wrongheaded of all is its insistence that corporations are just like people and entitled to the same First Amendment rights.
It was a fundamental misreading of the Constitution to say that these artificial legal constructs have the same right to spend money on politics as ordinary Americans have to speak out in support of a candidate.
The Times suggested Congress & President Obama respond in a number of ways, including –
It should also enact a law requiring publicly traded corporations to get the approval of their shareholders before spending on political campaigns.
Today, the Times, which is a corporation and therefore, according to the Times, not entitled to the same First Amendment rights as people, gave away ¼ of their Op-Ed page to Harold Ford to announce he was wasn’t going to run for Senator.
This free advertisement for Ford (worth over $100,000 if he bought an ad) allowed him to explain what a great job he would have done in the Senate and did not include any announcement that he would never run for office in the future.
In case you forgot, last year the Times did the same favor for Congressman Anthony Weiner, who announced that he wasn’t running for Mayor in 2009 and in 2008 for Mike Bloomberg, who used the Times valuable space to say he wasn’t running for President that year.
Everybody I know thinks Weiner is running for Mayor in 2013 and most think Mike is, at least, thinking about running for President in 2012.
To the best of my knowledge, the Times did not get the approval of their shareholders before making these in-kind contributions to Ford, Weiner or Bloomberg.
But since Mr. Sulzberger doesn’t think he’s like a 19th century robber baron, I guess it’s OK.