This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, July 23rd, 2012. I'm Caleb Brown.

Aaron Sorkin's Newsroom on HBO has taken on Citizens United and badly so.

The show first gets the ruling wrong and that

animates other misconceptions as well like for example that campaign finance

regulation poses no threat to the institutional press. John Samples, author of the fallacy of

campaign finance reform, comments. The HBO series newsroom has taken on the issue of

Citizens United alleging that the case was about unlimited campaign

contributions from unknown sources that corporations would be allowed to make.

How does that square with reality?

The first thing I noticed about it was, and you see this quite a bit,

is that it was just grossly wrong.

I mean, for those of us who who study whether you're left or right

and study these issues and study Citizens United, we know that Citizens United explicitly

says it has nothing to do with contributions to members of Congress to candidates

for office of the political parties. It's about independent spending, it's about

something else entirely, but you clearly since then that this is really just not a clip that's concerned with the facts of the issue,

but something that's trying to set up a heroes and villains scenario, a kind of framing of black and white.

Not really a clip that's concerned with the truth.

This is not uncommon.

Reporters actually get the holding of Citizens United

wrong on a fairly regular basis.

They attribute to Citizens United the scourge of Super PACs,

...