By Paul Taylor

Providing free air time to candidates is the single most promising way to fix what ails electoral politics. It's not a complete fix. There's no such thing. But by reducing the cost and improving the discourse of campaigns, it has the potential to do more good than any other reform - without running afoul of the courts, the constitution or the political culture.

Let's parse the benefits one at a time.

Political candidates spent $25 million on television advertising in '72 and $500 million in '96 - that's an increase of nearly five times the rate of inflation. Television ads are the single largest component of this increase. They account for roughly 40 percent of the total expense of congressional, senatorial and presidential campaigns. In competitive races for those offices - the ones decided within 8 points - the TV ads account for closer to 60 percent of total expenses.

The pressure to raise the funds to pay for the ads helps drive the obsessive money chase that leads to the scandals we've been wallowing in for the past year. You'll never do away with this money chase, but you can slow it down. Free air time will.

It will also remove a barrier to entry to politics. By assuring that all congressional candidates who meet thresholds of viability have the seed resources to get a message out, it will expand the talent pool of people attracted to politics.

It will work to level resources between challengers and incumbents, and between the wealthy and the not-wealthy.

And it will help insure that candidates remain the most robust communicators in their own campaigns. As readers of this magazine know, one of the biggest growth industries in political campaigns are TV spots run by issue ad groups - spots that often look, sound and feel like campaign ads.

These issue spots are a mixed blessing. Yes, the voters ought to be able to hear from everybody during election campaigns. But they have a particular need to hear from the candidates. The best way to assure that the candidates' voices will not be drowned out is not to restrict the speech of issue groups, but to promote the speech of candidates. Free air time would.

There are lots of different ways to put free air time into the electoral system. The principal bipartisan reform bill of '97 - McCain-Feingold - took the classical reform approach: free air time is offered as an incentive to candidates who agree to voluntary spending limits.

My own guess is that a bill based on spending limits will never make it through this Congress. I'd prefer to see a bill that removes soft money from politics and treats free air time as a "clean" replacement for the political parties.

This would mean providing some small amount of free air time to candidates for House, Senate and President, but providing large additional blocks to the parties, which would be free to divide it up on behalf of any candidate they wish, for federal, state or local office. It would be up to the parties to sort out all the messy questions of who gets how much air time in which races and media markets. These questions are impossible to legislate anyway - heavy air time makes sense in some years, not in others; it works in some districts, not in others. Let the politicians sort it out.

How much of this air time should there be? Well, let's start with that $500 million figure from the last campaign. That's a fortune in politics, but a pittance to broadcasters - less than one percent of their gross ad revenues during the '95-96 cycle. Given the tens of billions of dollars worth of new spectrum space the TV industry has just received from the government for free, it seems a small price to pay to fulfill their obligation to serve the "public interest, convenience and necessity."

Injecting free air time into the political system creates an opening - either by law or by stigma - to require candidates to appear in their free time spots.

The goal here is not to eliminate attacks; they are a part of politics. It is to discourage low blows by heightening accountability. Candidates Clinton and Dole did a few dozen of these free time spots during the closing weeks of their campaign last year. Scholars and viewers alike agreed that these presentations were more substantive, more accurate and more useful that other forms of political communication on television, including the ads and the news coverage.

I know that many campaign consultants consider candidate-to-camera ads to be "eat your spinach" TV, the ultimate turn-off. But I also know that's how millions of Americans view paid TV ads, with their sneering narrators, ominous music and deceptive visuals.

Can't we invent a new way for candidates to communicate to citizens on TV in short, efficient, informative segments that would send them toward a voting booth - and not a shower stall - on election day?

By Eddie Fritts

If campaign finance reform is the answer, what is the question? That's the current debate, and there are those who think they have it all figured out: mandate more free television airtime for candidates.

Conventional wisdom holds that the cost of communicating has risen so dramatically that candidates are forced to raise huge sums of money just to remain competitive. Give politicians more free TV time, costs will drop, and presto!... the campaign finance system will be reformed!

As usual, the conventional wisdom is flat wrong. Just ask Dwight Morris, the former Los Angeles Times reporter who now runs the Campaign Study Group. Morris studied more than 1,400 House and Senate races waged between '90 and '94. His conclusion: "despite a mountain of readily available evidence to the contrary, most journalists and Sunday morning talking heads desperately cling to the notion that television advertising is the primary culprit behind ever-rising campaign costs." Journalists, said Morris, "have been misleading the public for years."

The cost of individual TV ads is not the reason why campaign costs have soared. Candidates, through their consultants, are simply buying more time each year - three times as much as was purchased 10 years ago - in an effort to "carpet bomb" the electorate with more attack ads.

Broadcasters would like to see the level of political discourse enhanced, as evidenced by the thousands of hours of free time each election season in the form of news coverage, candidate profiles, public affairs programming and debates. That's the type of coverage valued by the American people, rather than a federally-mandated free time plan that would simply enable politicians to double up on negative attack ads.

Legitimate campaign coverage - the kind of free time that is freely given by broadcasters - is indeed what voters desire. Opinion Research Corp. polled voters in April on behalf of PROMAX and asked what TV format provided the most valuable candidate information. The results: 36% chose debates; 300% chose newscasts; 17% chose public affairs and interview programs; 6% chose political advertising and 11% had no comment/no response.

In other words, 83 percent of respondents said they received their most valuable information from free airtime already donated by broadcasters. Moreover, 61 percent of those surveyed opposed giving politicians free airtime on top of existing paid advertising.

Broadcasters have a great tradition of voluntarily offering free time for debates. The dirty little secret is that politicians have an equally long tradition of rejecting those offers.

Examples:

• WRC-TV in Washington, D.C. went to great lengths to schedule an Oct. 29 Virginia gubernatorial debate between major candidates. The 30-minute, commercial-free debate would have aired on the NBC affiliate at 7:30 p.m. a week before the election. One of the major candidates declined the offer, even after contending he could not buy all the ad time he was seeking.

• As reported in National Journal, Wisconsin Broadcasting Association President John Laabs "routinely sponsors senatorial and gubernatorial debates." Last year, Laabs went a step further, orchestrating a multi-state debate between the GOP presidential hopefuls on the eve of Wisconsin's March 12 primary. Primaries were slated all over the country that month, so Laabs won the cooperation of broadcast associations in 12 other states, with dozens of television stations agreeing to run the program live. The value of the debate time was in the millions of dollars. But there was a catch: the candidates never showed.

• President Clinton, a free time advocate, along with Senator Dole, each declined 30 minutes of free time offered on election eve in '96 by the Fox network. There were no strings attached, no moderators and no spin doctors. Yet the no-cost offered time was rejected. Let's also note that federal law already requires TV stations to provide candidates "lowest unit rate" advertising that is equivalent to about a 30 percent discount. That break translates into millions in savings for candidates in each election.

  Advocates of federally-mandated free time argue that since broadcasters use the public airwaves, the public would benefit by defraying the cost of campaigning. But FCC member Rachelle Chong parries that argument quite succinctly. "If you follow this line of reasoning," says Chong, "maybe we should ask airlines to give free airplane seats to political candidates - airlines use the public airways...too!"

  Finally, Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) makes the valid point that a free airtime mandate is unconstitutional in that it violates the Fifth Amendment standard on taking property without due process of law.

  Our system of community-based broadcasting - founded on a commitment to localism and the First Amendment continues to serve audiences and voters across the country. The public makes clear it values debates, candidate profiles and public affairs programs most, and more political ads least. Broadcasters are explicitly fulfilling the public's desire.