Washington ? An unfunny thing happened to the campaign finance reform bill on its way through the House of Representatives on the night of Feb. 13. While proclaiming their devotion to the noble cause of curbing special interest influence on government, a huge majority of members gave one of the most powerful lobbies in town  the broadcasting industry  a multimillion-dollar benefit to its bottom-line profits.

They did so by stripping from the Shays-Meehan bill a Senate-passed provision that would have put teeth into the requirement that broadcasters sell ad time to federal candidates at a rate no higher than they charge their best customers.

The vote of 327-101 to delete that provision was the payoff for a yearlong lobbying effort by TV station owners to kill that part of the bill before it went to the White House.

With sponsors of the measure determined to try this week to pass the House version through the Senate without any changes, the broadcasters appear to be on the verge of success. As Broadcasting & Cable magazine, a trade publication, reported after the House vote, “Back in their headquarters, the National Association of Broadcasters popped the champagne. ‘We’re deeply appreciative of the strong bipartisan vote stripping the Torricelli amendment from campaign-reform legislation that would have done serious damage to local broadcasters,’ NAB president Eddie Fritts said.”

“Serious damage” is one way of describing the amendment by New Jersey Sen. Bob Torricelli, which panicked the broadcasters when it won a surprising 70-30 approval in the Senate last March. Alternatively, you could say it was “stopping the hemorrhage” of contributors’ cash into the coffers of the owners of the public airways.

Between 1980 and 2000, an analysis by the nonpartisan Alliance for Better Campaigns showed, the amount spent on political ads in major market TV outlets more than quadrupled from less than $200 billion to almost $800 billion, even after adjusting for inflation.

Part of the reason for that extraordinary increase is the proliferation of ads by political parties and private groups, financed by the six-figure soft-money contributions the pending bill would outlaw. But the other reason is that broadcasters have found it easy to charge candidates premium rates, in order to be guaranteed that their spots will not be pre-empted from placement on popular prime-time programs or adjacent to local news shows. An academic study of 17 media markets found that the average cost of a 30-second spot tripled from the end of August 2000 to the end of October, as broadcasters profited from the demand for favored times. The Senate amendment would have stopped the gouging and thereby reduced the need for constant fund raising by candidates.

People who follow the issue tell me they were not surprised that the House caved. TV advertising is more vital in statewide Senate races than in many House contests. Especially in metropolitan areas with clusters of congressional districts, House candidates often find mail or phones a more efficient way to target their own constituents. In small-town and rural America, the station manager and news director are likely to be influential with members of the House, because they can decide who is interviewed on the air and who isn’t.

It is also the case, the insiders say, that none of the main proponents of the bill to ban unlimited soft-money contributions to the political parties regarded the Torricelli amendment as vital to their main purpose. So resistance to stripping it was weak, especially when some House members said that, unless it was removed, pressure from the broadcasters would make it hard for them to support the overall bill.

Nonetheless, it leaves one of the worst elements of American political finance intact. At a forum last week sponsored by the private International Foundation for Election Systems, at which scholars from several countries commented on the just-passed bill, Michael Pinto-Duschinsky of Britain reported that in a just-completed survey of 146 countries’ campaign finance systems, “what is exceptional about America is its not having free broadcasting” granted to candidates and parties.

Paul Taylor, a former journalistic colleague who now runs the Alliance for Better Campaigns, has been calling on the broadcasters for years to provide such time in the weeks leading up to an election.

If and when the pending bill becomes law, Taylor says he will resume the uphill battle “to require that broadcasters provide free air time for candidate issue discussion before every election as a condition of the free licenses they receive to operate on our public airwaves.”

As Taylor likes to say, it is time the broadcast industry “stops viewing the fundamental act of democracy as a cash cow.”

 David Broder is a columnist for Washington Post Writers Group.