Free speech, costly campaigns.(Indiana state politics virtually unregulated)(No Sacred Cows)

With press coverage of special-interest politics on the rise, what's a politician to do when confronted with a damaging expose?

Indiana state Sen. Harold "Potch" Wheeler (R) decided to hit back. In January he introduced a bill that would have charged the media for their use of office space--commonly known as the Press

Room--in the Indiana statehouse. Newspapers and radio and television stations are for-profit enterprises, he said, and so don't deserve the free space. (Never mind that rent-free press rooms are a long-standing tradition in most city and county halls, statehouses and the U.S. Capitol.

But others said Wheeler's bill had more to do with recent media attention on the 80 percent of his 1994 campaign contributions that came from special-interest groups. And, notes one observer, Wheeler wasn't the only legislator to adopt a "let's get reporters" attitude after top campaign benefactors were exposed.

While Wheeler's anti-media measure went down to defeat, it highlighted the power of information about campaign contributors. And unintimidated reporters have continued their coverage of the state's campaign finance system, previously uncharted territory in Indiana.

Whereas some states have enjoyed easy, electronic access to campaign finance records for years, Indiana's weak disclosure laws have left most state residents in the dark about which interests are bankrolling their elected officials. But the Center for Public Integrity, a Washington, D.C.-based group, recently compiled a computerized database of all 1994 contributions to Indiana state candidates and made it available for public use.

To the dismay of many state legislators, people are talking. The Indianapolis Star and News received an overwhelming 1,500 reader responses to its February "Statehouse Sellout" series. "A lot of readers were greatly disturbed when they learned what was going on" in state politics, says series co-author Janet Williams. Many readers also called the paper to ask what they could do to promote reform or to talk about what they had read, Williams says.