Making yourself heard on television commonly takes the form of TV advertising, which is all about money, unfortunately.
Like I answered in your other post, equality of air time for each candidate. I know, you've had twenty something candidates, and it would be hard to make that work. Tough luck, that's the price to pay for a fairer election.
I don't envy your ridiculous two year long campaigns, but at least you'd get some diversity, unlike your two-candidates-blow-100-million-in-total-and-bombard-you-for-months current way of doing it. And who knows, that might even bring you to reform your woefully outdated political system.
Where "air time" means "time across all possible cable channels", right?
And presumably equality of "youtube time" too? How do you even measure this?
Seriously, we're way past there being 5 broadcast TV networks and nothing else where you could try enforcing some sort of mandate.
Keep in mind that Citizens United wasn't even "for" some particular candidate. It was against a particular candidate and wanted to show its movie at a point in time when it wasn't even clear who the candidate's opponents would be. Assuming you imposed the "equality of air time" doctrine in this situation, who's air time would the movie come out of, exactly?
It's easy to just claim the system is broken; figuring out how to fix it sanely is much harder.
(And for the record, I agree that the current campaign lengths and costs in the US are ridiculous. What I don't see is how to make them less so without imposing some pretty totalitarian speech controls, which would immediately get coopted by those in power to completely shut down anything resembling third party candidates.)
YouTube time is different because there's not one single place controlling your entire feed, noone dictating what you are going to watch. You can decide on your own to watch ten hours of your favourite candidate and ignore every other, because you made that choice and noone imposed it on you.
The Citizens United question is a bit tricky indeed, but two things:
- Ultimately, it is the TV channel's responsibility to have aired such a video, and as such should match any time campaigning for a candidate with others. But, like you said, it was more an attack then anything else. Which brings us to our second point:
- Straight up outlaw such clips that are an attack on a candidate. It serves no purpose other than to drive down the level, it makes the campaign absolutely worthless and is a danger to democracy. It is the most basic level, the dark depth of political life. It kills every debate, destroys every effort made to educate people, because ultimately attacks are cheap, entertaining and efficient. It truly makes society worse as a whole, and people stupid. Yes, that's maybe an attack on free speech. I believe keeping a higher level of debate is a tad more important than being able to take a dump on someone you don't like on live TV.
Let me give you examples of where I live, France, to alleviate some of your fears.
We have a council that ensures what is aired is either nonpartisan, or matched, with the ability to shut down entire TV programs if needed. It has not been done in decades, and most of it ends up being fines. The shitstorm that would happen if they did cancel an show would be quite the sight. Attacks are forbidden. Total campaign funds are capped. Campaign clips are of fixed length, are aired something like four times a day, randomly ordered, shown for all candidates. Public TV has an obligation to give financial and material aid for smaller candidates to ensure they can have a clip. You cannot start officially campaigning on TV and in the press before a set date. You could say we have some rather intensive speech control.
This previous election has seen the two traditional parties (LR & PS) failing miserably. The socialist party, one of the most important parties in the country and previous president's party ended up with a pitiful 6.5% of votes. REM, the new president's movement was born out of nowhere barely a year before the elections. FI managed to crystallize the leftist electorate and reach 19%, barely a percent below the traditional conservative candidate. The FN, as much as I despise them for everything they stand for, is not a traditional party. We have communist candidates. Yes, multiple, because the only thing harder than herding cats is getting communists to agree. We have one that intends to go to Mars. Every election, we have a dozen candidates. Every election, debates are held. They're even rather polite, usually. This year, Fillon has been bogged down in embezzlement affairs, Le Pen too. Aside from one deliciously satisfying bash during one debate, an which lasted 3 minutes over a 3 hour long debate, things stayed civil.
And that's just an example of how we do it here, and I definitely not believe it's perfect. Our political system has issues. Plenty of them. Look at other countries, look at how it's done. Improve on it, and take the best from each.
