"... the Koch Brothers were finally outed a year later as the source of the dark money ..."

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Between the Lines: Don’t let dark money distract from substantive campaign coverage
By Randy Wilson, August 3, 2014

When it comes to dark money in campaigns, are journalists so focused on who is providing it that they are missing the real story: what it is buying and why it often works.

Robert Kelty, former Coconino County schools superintendent, indirectly raised that question in a talk last week before the AAUW. He reconstructed the maze that money from a Koch Brothers foundation had to negotiate if it were to remain secret in the campaign against the state schools tax extension in 2012. Before the injection of $900,000 in negative campaign ads, Prop. 204 was winning handily, Kelty recalled. By November, it lost by a nearly equal margin.

The pro-tax side was unable to afford a comparable counter-attack, so they focused instead on the dark money aspect and finding the source of the cash. Journalists joined in the hunt under the assumption that knowing who was paying the bills — many suspected the Koch Brothers — was vital to voters making an informed choice.

But that meant journalists never got around to analyzing in depth the claims in the negative ads that were moving the needle on public opinion. Making the higher tax permanent, said the ads, would prolong the recession and cost jobs. A lower tax, in contrast, would stimulate the economy and produce the higher tax revenues without a higher rate.

This is classic free-market ideology that many economists contend is actually harmful during a recession, when more government spending is essential to replacing the private capital that has been withdrawn from the market. And in education, journalists in Arizona had a classic case of what historic underfunding has wrought and just waiting to be told.

When the Koch Brothers were finally outed a year later as the source of the dark money, no one was surprised, just like voters would not have been surprised had the revelation come during the campaign. Reporters would have done better by voters to make the economic theories at war in the campaign as transparent and understandable as they wanted the dark money to be. Ideas and values matter, and that’s where the light in campaign coverage ought to be shining.
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