Media makes 'campaign contributions' to candidates all the time by what they choose to publish and not publish?

Ira Stoll:

Imagine that a federal prosecutor had gone after The Washington Post Company back in the 1990s on the theory that the reluctance of its magazine, Newsweek, to publish an article about a sex scandal involving Bill Clinton constituted an illegal campaign contribution to the Clinton campaign.

The ensuing outcry and fear that prosecutors would begin substituting their own news judgment for that of editors wouldn’t have been limited to First Amendment absolutists like Nat Hentoff. It would almost certainly have been widely shared. And justifiably so.

As Newsweek itself eventually found out via Matt Drudge, and as the framers of the First Amendment well understood, free-market competition is better regulation of press behavior than any second-guessing by government lawyers threatening criminal prosecution based on creative theories of campaign finance law.

If the National Enquirer’s failure to publish an article about Donald Trump amounts to an undisclosed campaign contribution to the Trump campaign, how much did the New York Times contribute to the Trump campaign with the articles it actually did publish about Hillary Clinton’s private email server?

Maybe every news organization should be required to employ a team of campaign finance lawyers, evaluating every article, photograph, and unpublished story idea for its impact on the campaign’s outcome, assigning each a dollar value, and totaling it all up and reporting it to the Federal Election Commission and the U.S. attorney every three months.

President Trump’s rhetoric — “failing New York Times,” “enemy of the people” — generated, earlier this year, an unusual coordinated self-congratulatory editorial campaign in defense of press freedom. Yet now federal prosecutors in New York are happily announcing the imposition of “remedial measures” and “annual training” with “required attendance” for a media company — and not a peep of protest has been heard from the Freedom Forum, the professors of journalism, the Committee to Protect Journalists, or the rest of the industry whose level of self-regard was recently demonstrated by Time’s decision to make journalists their persons of the year.
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Liberals in the media, as well as Democrats in general, are rarely deterred by their own hypocrisy.  They have a way of rationalizing those concerns when they think it helps their political agenda.