William March: Campaign Contributions

“You cannot give money to someone else and have him or her contribute it to a campaign. It is illegal.”--- William March

It’s good to try and support a candidate financially, but you must follow the rules like everyone else. Everyone is allowed a limit on financial contributions to keep the elections fair. You cannot give money to someone else and have him or her contribute it to a campaign; it is illegal. It is one of the most difficult challenges for prosecutors to catch. No one will ever know unless someone tells, which is not likely to happen. William March gave my class a variety of websites to track down who has made contributions. By visiting these sites, as journalists, we can search for some unusual campaigns contributions that may be newsworthy, especially when the contributor donates a significant amount of money that he or she or the company does not have. These websites allow you to see what persons or company made contributions and whom they made contributions to.

March provided my class an example during the 1996 election where Bill Clinton received a large amount of soft money from an individual involved with a corporation named Future Tech. Soft money is given to a political party where there is no limit or cap on how much one can donate. March’s’ associate tracked down the guy through multiple public records. Some of the sites we were given as an example were: 1) sunbiz.org/, 2) moneyline.cq.com/pml/home.do, and 3) http://www.opensecrets.org/. March mentioned that the second website was his favorite and that we could check federal campaigns. You don’t have to use just these three websites; it’s as simple as going to Google and typing in campaign contributions.

Towards the end of the class we were lectured on the importance of self-control and opinions. March told us that he would not reveal to us his political party who whom he voted for. He stated that, “[we] could check public records and find out, but it is not something that I will reveal publicly” because of his job as journalist at the Tampa Tribune. I could sense he was holding something back, almost like an incident that occurred involving this topic. Something about his tone and the very serious facial expressions and body language revealed to me that this is a significant lesson to take in. I have never had a problem revealing which parties or candidates I support and disagree with, but then again I don’t work for the Tribune.