Scott Swanson
It’s unfortunate that State Rep. Jeff Kropf has decided that he must withdraw from his re-election campaign for the state Legislature.
Kropf, who represents Sweet Home and much of the local community, says his candidacy is causing problems for Portland’s KXL Radio, for which he is hosting a talk show on weekend mornings.
Kropf says he’s been forced into the choice because of federal laws that require radio and TV broadcasters to make equal time available to candidates. Since Kropf is a talk show host, KXL could be forced to provide equal broadcast time to Dan Thackaberry, the Democratic candidate in the race.
Kropf had already announced he was planning to leave government in 2008. This just accelerates the process.
While his opponents are crowing over his departure, I’m sorry to see Kropf go. Dubbed “Hollywood” by high school classmates, he has been a bit of a flamboyant character, once dressing as Elvis on the floor of the state House of Representatives.
But although I’m a relative newcomer to this area, I’m aware that he’s also represented basic values that are important to many people in our community – among them less intrusive government, more effective schools, developing alternative sources of energy via biofuels, assisting veterans, fighting illegal immigration, opposing tax increases and opposing social ills such as abortion.
Kropf says that his departure is due to an interpretation of an old law, the equal-opportunity rule, that he says is unfair.
It may be unfortunate that it’s forcing him to make the choice to drop out of this race, but the law itself isn’t unfair. The law, its earliest form passed in 1927, lays down some simple rules: If a broadcasting station permits one legally qualified candidate for any elective public office to use its facilities, it must afford an equal opportunity for all other legally qualified candidates for the same office. Equal opportunity means equal time, equal facilities and comparable cost.
There’s a reason why it only applies to broadcast media and not to newspapers or the Internet and that is because the airwaves belong to the public but they are limited. Anyone with sufficient finances can start a newspaper or create a Web site. There is no limit (other than the laws of supply and demand) on how many newpapers and Web sites can be in the community.
In the 1960s, some legal scholars suggested that the First Amendment provides people the right to gain access to the media to propogate their views. However, in a 1974 Supreme Court case, Miami Herald v. Tornillo, the conservative Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote a Supreme Court decision putting a stake through the heart of the notion that everyone had a right of access to the media.
However, the radio spectrum is a narrow segment of the airwaves, which belong to the public. In short, it is a limited resource, since only so many broadcasters can be on the spectrum at one time. Thus, Congress in the 1920s decided the airwaves had to be regulated because not to do so led to chaos on the airwaves and all manner of trouble.
Hence the equal opportunity rule.
Some argue that with the rise of cable, satellite and the Internet – media that do not have the problem of physical scarcity – the need for the equal opportunity law for broadcast media has diminished. I disagree.
Even though technology allows us access to a far wider spectrum of media than the old AM/FM radios we depended on when I was a kid, the radio and TV spectrums are still scarce and they still belong to the public and should therefore serve as wide a portion of that public as possible. That’s the thinking behind that law.
One legal expert I know of likens the broadcast situation to a waterway. You can live next to the river and even own property that encircles it, but you can’t pour oil in the river any time you feel like it. The river still belongs to the public and even though you can own, in a sense, a portion of it and benefit from it, you are restricted in how far you can take that ownership, at the expense of your fellow citizens.
It’s too bad Kropf couldn’t do what other broadcasters who have run for office have done – simply taken a leave of absence from his show until the election is over. That option is out of reach now and so we’ll just have to say a sad goodbye come December.