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Saturday, July 17, 1999

More public stations investigated
Six under scrutiny for sharing donor lists with political parties
By Melissa B. Robinson
Associated Press

WASHINGTON - More public television stations may have been sharing donor lists with political parties through list brokers, said a spokesman for a congressman who has called a hearing on the issue for next week.
   "The problem appears to be more pervasive than we first thought," Ken Johnson, spokesman for Rep. Billy Tauzin, R-La., said Friday.
   Johnson said documents indicate that public television stations KQED in San Francisco and KCET in Los Angeles and public radio station WNYC in New York have provided their donor lists to brokers who, in turn, may have provided them to the Democratic Party or other political organizations. He would not release the documents.
   Already, three other television stations, WGBH-TV in Boston, WNET in New York and WETA in Washington, D.C., are under scrutiny.
   Tauzin, chairman of the House Commerce telecommunications subcommittee, has scheduled a hearing on the matter Tuesday. Rep. Christopher Cox, R-Calif., has requested a separate hearing by Commerce's oversight subcommittee, which has investigatory authority.
   Tauzin plans to ask for a study by the General Accounting Office, Congress' investigatory arm, into whether list-swapping occurred at other stations or involved individual candidates as well as parties.
   "It's unethical, and if it's not already illegal, it soon will be," said Johnson. Republicans have also demanded a review of federal funding for public broadcasting. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting gets about $250 million a year from Congress.
   Sharing donor lists
   The controversy centers on whether public broadcasting stations swapped, sold, rented or otherwise provided their donor lists to political parties, in violation of federal tax law. There is typically a three-year statute of limitations on such violations.
   Sharing membership lists is a legitimate business practice done daily by countless organizations. However, the CPB, a private, nonprofit organization, is considered a charity for tax purposes. As such, it is barred from intervening directly or indirectly in political campaigns.
   Providing a donor list to a political party or candidate wouldn't necessarily constitute an improper intervention, as long as all political parties or candidates were given equal access to the list.
   Buying lists
   At WCET in Los Angeles, Laurel Lambert, director of advertising and promotions, said station policy forbids selling, renting or otherwise providing membership lists to political parties or candidates. But the reverse - the station's buying names from both the Democratic and Republican parties - has occurred.
   Lambert said brokers are directed to contact the station for approval of any new requests for lists. A search of station records now under way so far has uncovered no violations dating back to 1996, she said.
   WNYC said in a statement the station doesn't provide membership lists to political organizations, but it does rent and exchange lists with other groups. A spokesman, Tad Roebuck, said he didn't know whether the station provided lists to brokers.
   At KQED, the station reviewed its records and found that a membership list was leased, through a broker, to the Democratic National Committee in 1996, said David Shaw, a spokesman. Shaw said the station's policy was to exchange lists, one for one, with other nonprofits, but that is now being revised to exclude exchanges with advocacy and political organizations.
   And trading lists
   At WGBH, where names have been swapped with the DNC, officials said they instituted a policy against trading names with political organizations in 1994 but continued after that because of a "debt" incurred by a 1993 list acquisition.
   After that was resolved, subsequent swapping occurred because of administrative error, they said. Officials said they admitted the mistake to the Internal Revenue Service.
   On Thursday, WNET said it had started an internal investigation after learning a list broker working for the station had swapped names with the Democratic and Republican parties.
   WETA spokeswoman Cecily Van Praagh said the station traded donor lists with the DNC and "conservative and liberal" political organizations. The station planned to re-evaluate the practice.
   Jenny Backus, spokeswoman for the DNC, said the committee obtained the WGBH names through a broker. She said the committee always goes through brokers and does not deal directly with individual stations.
   "These are standard and routine business practices," she said.

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