Believe it or not, it looks like the campaign finance “reform” law (we can see by the existence of the 527s just how well it works) could hush up political blogs.

Declan McCullagh’s piece today at CNET, “The coming crackdown on blogging,” quotes Federal Election Commission member Bradley Smith that non-news organizations could face fines under McCain-Feingold for “improperly linking to a campaign’s Web site.”

The FEC exempted the Internet from the law in 2002 by a 4-2 vote. However, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly last fall overturned that decision, according to CNET.

Smith and the other two Republican commissioners wanted to appeal the Internet-related sections. But because they couldn’t get the three Democrats to go along with them, what Smith describes as a “bizarre” regulatory process now is under way.

The six-member FEC is working to extend the law to the Internet. From McCullagh’s Q and A interview with Smith:

If Congress doesn’t change the law, what kind of activities will the FEC have to target?
We’re talking about any decision by an individual to put a link (to a political candidate) on their home page, set up a blog, send out mass e-mails, any kind of activity that can be done on the Internet.

Again, blogging could also get us into issues about online journals and non-online journals. Why should CNET get an exemption but not an informal blog? Why should Salon or Slate get an exemption? Should Nytimes.com and Opinionjournal.com get an exemption but not online sites, just because the newspapers have a print edition as well?

Why wouldn’t the news exemption cover bloggers and online media?
Because the statute refers to periodicals or broadcast, and it’s not clear the Internet is either of those. Second, because there’s no standard for being a blogger, anyone can claim to be one, and we’re back to the deregulated Internet that the judge objected to. Also I think some of my colleagues on the commission would be uncomfortable with that kind of blanket exemption.

Michelle Malkin, Wizbang and Redstate have decent roundups of the blogosphere’s reaction. But I’m going to take a different tack.

I will be watching the MSM’s coverage (if any) of this potential disaster. Will the press cover it neutrally (not likely), or take sides for Internet censorship? Besides the media’s tendency to never come across federal regulation they don’t like, look at it this way — the blogosphere has shined quite a bright light on how the liberal media works, and the MSM’s credibility has suffered grievously as a result. Only they have the right to freedom of the press (in their eyes), and they’d love to see the federal government shut down their independent and vigorous competition.

Both sides of the blogosphere need to pool together and stop this thing. I think we will see a unification on this issue — with the Nov. 2 election and the Democratic Party’s loss of the MSM as a reliable toady, the Democratic Party now relies on the Internet as much as anyone else.

We’ll be watching the media and how they play this potential legislation. But for you Fourth Estate types who may be reading this, keep in mind that shutting us up will in no way restore your credibility. Americans never really trusted the press to begin with — the Internet just gave us a way to voice it.

You can e-mail John McCain here and Russ Feingold here.