Debates: Important Information for the Electorate or Profit Center?

Our efforts to inform the public and support democracy should not require a paid admission ticket.

A headline caught my eye from a small, independent news operation in South Dakota this week. It read, “Subscriber tickets now available for this week’s Sioux Falls mayoral debate.” The news operation is The Dakota Scout, a locally owned, for-profit newsroom covering the state from Sioux Falls. It relies on advertising and a paywall to support its expansive web site, along with its weekly printed version. The newspaper had teamed up with SiouxFallsLive.com, another for-profit newsroom operating a web site and TV channel in Sioux Falls, to hold a mayoral debate last night focused on public safety.

Both newsrooms livestreamed the event on their respective web sites for voters to take in. But in-person access to the event was another matter. As the headline above notes, subscribers to The Dakota Scout could purchase a ticket for $8 to attend the event. That struck me as odd. Why charge admission to attend an event hosted by journalism organizations that’s aimed at informing the public in the run-up to the election on June 2? The article notes there were some free seats to the event only available to members of law enforcement and their families. That’s also a questionable decision, but more on that in a moment.

The idea of charging admission for an election debate rubs me the wrong way.

I understand there are physical limits to venues and that there must be audience controls in place to manage the space. Most debates handle this by allowing the public to get free tickets to attend, or by handing out blocks of tickets to the candidates or the parties to allow them to invite their own supporters. The latter option can lead to unruly crowds cheering for one candidate or booing another, but so be it. At least they didn’t have to pay to get in.

I’m not sure what I like less about charging admission to an election debate. On the one hand, it just seems petty and cheap. It’s a nickel-and-dime approach to gaining some revenue where no revenue should be expected. If the admission charge was to cover the cost of the venue, find a place that will allow it for free. This event was held at the South Dakota Military Heritage Alliance museum, a venue that appears to offer itself for rent for all sorts of events (you could have seen wrestler Mick Foley’s one man show there last Friday night). Universities, libraries and public buildings often come at no cost—and those places will sometimes cover the associated costs of using the space. If the admission fee was just to put a bit more money in the pockets of the two newsrooms, that’s even worse.

My other complaint is that charging admission to events like this that are important to our democracy is inherently undemocratic.

Eight dollars may not seem like a lot to most people, but there are those who can’t spare it. Do those people not need this information? Do they not matter to these candidates? Sure, the event was livestreamed and available at no charge that way. But that again assumes everyone who wants to watch has the means to see a livestream—again, this is ultimately undemocratic in its assumption.

I noted above that some seats at the debate were free of charge, reserved for members of law enforcement and their families. I must question the reasoning behind this. While I understand this was a debate focused on public safety, what’s the purpose of packing the audience with cops? I could see this setup working if the law enforcement members in the audience had a role asking questions in the debate. I watched the whole thing—they did not. All the questions came from the two journalist moderators. So it seems these free seats were wasted. While members of law enforcement will certainly be affected by any safety policies a new mayor might wish to enact, none of those law enforcement members has a greater say in who gets elected to champion those policies than any other voter, meaning the cops have no greater right to those seats than any other voter.

Aside from charging for tickets, there was another commercial aspect to this event that gave me pause—the sponsor list.

Four of the event sponsors were typical community-based entities with an interest in seeing the region prosper: Ascend Financial (a wealth management company), Craze Minds Marketing (an advertising and marketing strategy agency), Sioux Falls Insurance-Eric Meyers Group (an insurance agency) and South Dakota Trade (a non-profit focused on building trade with South Dakota companies and industries). These are the types of sponsors I would expect for an event like this and, while I’m not sure how their funds or in-kind donations were applied, there’s no concern about associating them with the two news organizations running the event. In fact, most were probably already advertisers for one or both of the publications.

But there was a sponsor in the mix that really does concern me. Americans for Prosperity (AFP) paid for an open bar reception following the debate. If you’re unfamiliar, AFP is the Koch brothers-founded political advocacy group with opaque funding sources and a history of unethical and deceptive election practices. The group once posted fake eviction notices on homes in Detroit to scare residents into opposing a bridge project. It sent absentee voter applications to Democrats before a Wisconsin recall election of six Republican state senators—applications that had the wrong address on the return envelope and would have effectively prevented any Democrats using them from voting. AFP aired political ads targeting Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Gary Peters in Michigan that contained quantifiably false information about a patient undergoing cancer treatment and what she would pay for that care under the Affordable Care Act. These are not the actions of a group simply supporting a certain partisan point of view. They are actions meant to undermine the operation of our political system. That, to me, is inconsistent with the goals of the mayoral debate—any debate—and should have disqualified AFP as a sponsor. Beyond that, neither news organization should have a cozy relationship with an organization as controversial as this. There could easily arise a situation in which journalists for these newsrooms have to cover a dirty tricks effort backed by AFP in their own communities. That could lead to some awkward relationship questions such as “So why did Americans for Prosperity buy you free drinks at an event you were organizing?” As a journalist, I wouldn’t want to have to answer that question.

In the end, I salute these newsrooms for making the effort to sponsor a debate for an important city campaign. Please do it again. But next time, invite the public for free, don’t give the cops special seats and be pickier about who gets to be a sponsor.