News media outlets have enjoyed longstanding exemptions from federal and state campaign finance restrictions. It makes sense to extend those exemptions to nonprofit social and civic groups that also inform the public. Extending the media exemption would help encourage more information about important public policy issues.
Jon Riches, director of national litigation for the Goldwater Institute’s Scharf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation, made that argument Monday during a presentation to the John Locke Foundation’s Shaftesbury Society.
Riches made a case for protecting educational nonprofit groups’ donor privacy.