By Dr. Harold Pease
Political scientists have long known that the first election in any presidential contest is the medias. They decide who gets coverage, how they are covered, and just as importantly, who does not. Other factors too weigh in, such as frequency of coverage, type of coverage, questions asked and etc. Media bias is now obvious to most and documented in many studies. No news flash here!
A case in point, national televised media outlets who favor the re-election of Barack Obama, and most do (especially is this so with MSNBC), will tend to play more clips of mega storm Sandy and fewer clips on new highly damaging reports to the President on the terrorist attack on our ambassador in Benghazi. Fox News, which tends to favor Mitt Romney, will cover the storm but will make certain that their viewers see the new evidence. This is normal bias, although accentuated the last few years.
But there is a story with respect to the media establishment’s consistent exclusion of presidential candidates from any political party outside Republican and Democratic. It happens every four years. Candidates not getting coverage are not known to be running by the public and thus are guaranteed to lose by those entrusted to tell us. Each election year a student invariably asks who I support. My answer, “I do not know, the media has not yet identified all presidential contenders,” intrigues him, as I am a political scientist. Every late October of an election year since 1992, I have written the Federal Election Commission to get this critical and consistently omitted information. They offer two reports, one “The 2012 Presidential Address List” and the other, “Ballots of Each State and the District of Columbia” from which the following is extracted.
Political Scientists have also known that there are always more than 200, closer to 400, individuals running for that high office and well over twenty political parties in the country at any given time, many of which provide a candidate. Presently there are 405 individuals running for president and 53 political parties functioning in the United States. Those running include past and present Governors, U.S. Senators and members of the House of Representatives. Certainly there are many less notables as well. Each candidate is required by law to register with the Federal Elections Commission if they have raised or spent $5,000 or more on their candidacy for president, so they are serious candidates.
Twenty-eight of these were powerful enough to make it on one state ballot or more with little or no national media mention. In an effort to limit ballot names each state develops its own hurdles. No state wants 400 entrées and to that end the media legitimately also assist in exclusion, but nothing justifies national, or near national, blackout of everyone except the two favored parties. Of the 28, three, in addition to the anointed Democratic and Republican party candidates, were able to get placement in more than half of the states in the union. These candidates were: Virgil H. Goode of The Constitution Party, Jill Stein of The Green Party, and Gary Johnson of The Libertarian Party. Anyone able to vault the hurdles of twenty-five states or more should have earned the right to debate Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. We have a right to know how they might differ from each other and the designated candidates.
The strongest case for media manipulation of the election is the Libertarian Party who frequently qualifies in every state in the union, but is consistently denied access to the television cameras of the debate. They have attended but are denied placement.
It is the same every presidential election, each of these parties providing a candidate for the last 30 years. The national media has seemingly funneled the “sheeple” (people who tend to follow without deep thinking) into only two corrals by pretending that there are no other choices. Remember, each candidate got into state ballots without national media help. Any party would field a candidate in all fifty states if given any real media coverage. America does have choices but only if the media inform us of them.
On October 23, the day following the third Mitt Romney / Barack Obama debate, four of the ostracized presidential candidates held their own debate. Unable to get a network to cover them, their debate was on the Internet and is available through U-tube. Participants included the parties previously named plus Roseanne Barr of the Peace and Freedom Party. Not one word, however, from the establishment press announcing the debate or commenting on it later. You had to learn of it from a dedicated columnist.
Perhaps our free elections are not as free as we have supposed.
Dr. Harold Pease is an expert on the United States Constitution. He has dedicated his career to studying the writings of the Founding Fathers and applying that knowledge to current events. He has taught history and political science from this perspective for over 25 years at Taft College. To read more of his weekly articles, please visit www.LibertyUnderFire.org.