Political scientist tracks funding sources

Ken Goldstein, a new political scientist at UW–Madison, is to journalists right now as an epicenter is to seismologists.

The media are trying to track him down, day or night, because Goldstein has information they want: Who is spending how much on which presidential candidate, via the murky means of soft-money TV advertising.

Try chatting with him in his office for even a few minutes, and you’ll witness a man under siege, with two phones ringing and his computer signaling that, yes, he’s definitely got mail from journalists who can’t get through on those two phones.

“This is just insane,” he says with a shake of his head.

But as epicenters go, Goldstein is remarkably calm. Perhaps it’s because he used to be what his besiegers are: a scrambling journalist. And he knows how important hard data are to journalists in a previously data-free zone.

The data are now flowing in real time to those hungry journalists through a project Goldstein’s working on with the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law. It is funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Goldstein’s study uses data from the Campaign Media Analysis Group to monitor political advertising in the nation’s top 75 media markets. Every political ad aired is reviewed, quantified and coded through technology originally deployed in Davy Jones’ locker.

“CMAG uses the same technology developed by the U.S. military to track Russian submarines,” says Goldstein. “Every submarine screw has its own audio fingerprint, and so does every political ad.” Once a profile is coded after the ad’s first airing, then CMAG can automatically detect every time it’s repeated.

The overall finding on the 2000 presidential election: Soft-money advertising continues to cut a very wide swath through the airwaves. “Soft money” represents unregulated donations from corporations, nonprofit groups and wealthy individuals – often through the conduit of political parties – as opposed to the “hard money” from candidates’ campaigns, which are barred from accepting more than $2,000 from any one individual.

From June through September, for example, the parties poured more than twice as much money into the top 75 media markets for TV ads than did the candidates themselves (see graphic).

“So the big story is that if the line between hard- and soft-money ads was blurred in the ’96 election, then it’s been obliterated in 2000,” says Goldstein. “The law of the jungle rules in political advertising.”

That begs the question: Why care? “I would support higher contribution limits to candidates, but I do want full disclosure, and I do want campaigns and candidates to follow both the letter and the spirit of the law,” says Goldstein. “That allows voters to assess the sources of money for each candidate, so in turn they can understand what the candidate may do if elected.”

In short, you can’t see the trees for the forest, and the trees can be very telling. Once he outlines those trees with his data, he’s going to write a book called “Seeing Spots: Television Advertising and U.S. Elections,” under contract with Cambridge University Press.

Listen to Goldstein talk to reporters – and that’s unavoidable these days if you’re within earshot of him – and you can tell he’s practiced in the ways of journalism. He gives answers that are pithy, pointed and colorful.

That’s because he was on the other side of the table for three years as a producer for CBS. He first worked for the network’s election team, spending long hours on the campaign trail, and then for CBS News Nightwatch with Charlie Rose.

“It was a great opportunity for a young person,” he says, “and I became the perfect cocktail party guest: I could talk about any topic for 10 minutes – but no more than 10 minutes, and that became frustrating.”

When CBS began cutting back its news staff, Goldstein says he decided that “I didn’t want to end up as a 40-year-old who gets fired.” So he left journalism as easily as he had entered, never really having chosen journalism as his profession, but just hearing about the CBS opportunity through a chance encounter.

“I never really had plan in my life,” he says. After graduating from Haverford College with a bachelor’s in political science, he assumed the next step would be law school. Instead, his next steps were the ones he took on a three-month trip around the world, interrupted by a case of appendicitis in Thailand.

Two years later, while taking time off from the 1988 campaign, he had an epiphany on a beach in Brazil: “I realized that I didn’t want to be a lawyer,” says Goldstein.

After his CBS stint, he also realized that he liked politics, but wanted to produce something more substantial than two-minute stories about it. So he entered graduate school at Michigan, got his first job at Arizona State and came to UW–Madison last summer with his wife, Amanda, and daughter, Samantha. Their brand-new son, Nathaniel, joined them two months ago as a true Madison native.

For a man with no plan, Goldstein has ended up in an interesting professional position – the same one shared by his father, Steve Goldstein, who’s a Chinese politics specialist on the Smith College faculty.

Landing at UW–Madison – “my dream job,” he calls it – does carry a tinge of irony. When he applied for graduate school, he was accepted by Duke, Ohio State, Virginia, Cornell and Texas, in addition to Michigan. The lone rejection: UW–Madison.

“I still have the letter,” says Goldstein with a smile, “and I think I’m going to frame it on my office wall.”