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The issue wasn't that they made a movie, or that they wanted to show it on TV, but that they paid Comcast a ton of money to make it available for free on-demand. Considering that, most of the time, networks pay the creators to air their media and not vice-versa, this made it look more like a political ad than a normal documentary. I agree that the decision was correct, but the upshot was that PACs that run ads that are virtually indistinguishable from official ads are able to accept unlimited donations, which seems contrary to the spirit of restricted campaign donations. They can't endorse actual candidates, or coordinate with campaigns, but they can run the kinds of relentless attack ads that actual campaigns have been running as long as I've been alive.
This seems to be a common view of the outcome of the decision, but Justice Stevens' dissent makes the point that Citizens United could have poured unlimited funds into publishing and promoting the movie through a PAC without violating the statute. He argues that CU only violated the law by funding the movie through from their corporate treasury, rather than through a PAC. That's a big component of his argument that the 1A wasn't violated; he says the statute didn't ban CU's speech, it just diverted that speech through a different mechanism.
Which, if correct, makes the outrage over the CU decision even more puzzling. None of the critics of CU seem to be saying, "Unlimited campaign finance spending by corporations is just fine, actually, as long as it's done through a PAC rather than the corporate treasury!" That's why I still feel like I'm missing something.
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This seems like a remarkably poor argument. One of the most obvious characteristics of advertisement, relative to other forms of media, is that the people they are supposed to be consumed by aren't demanding them. If I make a movie and offer to pay the theatres to screen it for free, that is very, very different from me making an ad, and paying the theatres to play it before the movie other people actually want to see. As a general rule, ads are not made exclusively and intentionally for optional viewing.
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Well this itself is pretty contradictory to the whole idea of freedom of speech anyways. So its kinda a feature of the 1st Amendment. The problem with CU is it split the baby instead of negating all federal campaign finance law.
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