The 2006 campaign season in Nevada has been remarkably different from prior campaign seasons. Not because of the Jim Gibbons-Chrissy Mazzeo strangeness. Well, OK, because of that. But also because of what that bizarre tale has spawned -- substantial TV news coverage of something that has to do with a political race. That’s unusual.

But going forward, we can’t hope to have some congressman getting accused of wolfing on a woman half his age every campaign cycle. Well, OK, we can. But there’s no guarantee it’ll happen in Nevada -- it might be Texas, or Florida, or Utah next time. Which is to say this year’s uncharacteristic attention to political coverage by local television news is just that -- uncharacteristic.

Customarily, local TV’s role in campaigns is decisive, in a crushing sort of way. That overpowering influence, however, has little or even nothing to do with TV news, and is attributable primarily to TV ads.

With rare and sometimes wonderful exceptions (the piece on Jim and Dawn Gibbons’ illegal immigrant nanny by KLAS’s George Knapp being this year’s hands down winner), it is print, still, that does most of the meat and potatoes reporting on a political race. Then candidates take a headline or an opponent’s quote from those print stories, mangle it, tangle it, twist it beyond the bounds of context that any reasonable person might recognize, and put it on TV in an ad.

In other words, print journalism writes the stories, then candidates pay the TV stations lots of money to run ads that are based on the print stories. TV stations should run more ads in newspapers, just out of fair play. They owe them.

The Las Vegas Sun, in a story that probably won’t find its way into a political ad, recently went looking at the ad buys made by various candidates at the four local broadcast stations for the final weeks of the campaign. As the Sun noted, all the numbers were tentative -- more buying was/is certainly in the works (if there are any available spots to be bought). Rep. Jon Porter was the big winner in the fun Sun story, with the congressman scheduled to drop $1.2 million in the last month of the campaign. So get a load of him. No really, turn on your TV, and you’ll get a full-on load of him.

But the Sun also listed amounts being spent on advertising by various sundry other candidates and causes, ranging from Porter’s opponent, Tessa Hafen and her surrogates to judicial races that almost no one knows anything about to supporters and/or opponents of smoking tobacco and/or pot.

We can’t know exactly how much money was spent on political TV ads in 2006 until all the federal and state reports come in. By which time, presumably, nobody will really care because they’re not getting bombarded with political ads anymore.

In 2004, $43 million was spent on political ads in the Las Vegas market, estimates TNS Media Intelligence, a firm that tries to keep track of such things.

But they’re raking in a lot.

And that is why candidates need to raise all that money in the first place. So they can throw it to local TV stations, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars at a single toss.

To be sure, media buyers take a cut. And TV ads aren’t a campaign’s only expenses. But they’re the biggest one. For instance, Porter, the area big spender heading down the home stretch, spent a total of $1.73 million during the three months ending Sept. 30, according to his federal campaign finance report; $1.44 million, or 83 percent, was on media buys. (Porter reportedly bought early, so a good portion of that no doubt accounts for the $1.2 million noted in the Sun).

The most oft-stated argument against publicly financed campaigns is that taxpayer money shouldn’t be used for politicians to buy offensive TV ads. It’s a ludicrous argument. The total spent on political advertising in 2004, a record year, was in the neighborhood of $1.7 billion nationally. That sounds like a lot. But Congressional committees meeting in the dead of night when nobody’s watching routinely bestow tax breaks or windfalls much bigger than that to big-pocketed contributors from the energy or pharmaceutical or financial services industries. If its efficiency and savings that taxpayers are looking for, they should be screaming bloody murder for publicly financed campaigns in the hope of getting big donors out of the legislation-writing business.

A more cogent objection to publicly financed campaigns is that it would take all that taxpayer money and hand it over to TV stations.

Why would we want to do that? Those TV airwaves, after all, already belong to the public. TV stations even have obligations to serve the public as a condition of their license.

Instead of forcing our elected officials and political candidates to genuflect before their financial betters and beg for campaign contributions -- effectively indenturing themselves, and public policy, to the people who have the most money -- TV stations should be required to provide free allotments of advertising time for candidates.

A not unreasonable place to start might be allocating ad time in proportion to the total time that was purchased to contest a particular office in the prior cycle, and splitting it up evenly between major party candidates. Then make allowances for third party candidates and independent candidates. Riffing off the rules in those states that do have publicly financed campaigns (there are such places), candidates could buy their own ads if they want -- but then they would forfeit all the free time.

Yeah, yeah, devils, details, etc.

But hey, we can put a man on the moon. Or used to could, anyway.

Goodness knows campaign ad reform would not improve the quality or veracity of political ads. Even if we remove some of the pernicious influence of money in politics, politicians are still going to be, well, politicians.

But whatever imperfections persist after a wholesale overhaul of the campaign ad system, it’s hard to see how it could be worse than what we’ve got.