Who should decide who’s a top-tier candidate in the nation’s first presidential primary on Tuesday in New Hampshire? According to the Union Leader’s Joseph W. McQuaid, the publisher of the state’s largest-circulation newspaper, it should be the voters of New Hampshire. That’s as it should be.
On the other hand, major media elitists see themselves as determining who the "viable" candidates are. They feign objectivity of course. But their actions show that they slant the news to benefit some candidates and harm others, all the while pretending to be objective.
This media bias is sometimes subtle and sometimes not. But rarely is it as embarrassingly transparent as it was when Fox News refused to invite presidential candidate Ron Paul to participate in their forum of GOP presidential candidates on Sunday, just two days before the New Hampshire primary. Paul was at least included in Saturday’s ABC Republican debate a day earlier, but Duncan Hunter was excluded from both the ABC and Fox events. And ABC also excluded presidential candidates Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel from Saturday’s Democratic debate.
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Though the Union Leader had endorsed Senator John McCain for president, publisher Joseph McQuaid expressed his outrage [1] with the ABC and Fox decisions to exclude certain candidates. "It is a perversion of the New Hampshire primary process to have serious, if longshot, contenders excluded from this possibly significant TV exposure," McQuaid thundered in his Union Leader editorial. "All New Hampshire citizens should be insulted and affronted by it."
McQuaid continued: "It is the New Hampshire tradition that allows the lesser-known and less well-funded candidates, the underdogs, to make their case and have half a chance at success. For ABC and Fox to so arbitrarily reduce that chance, all to make for a better ‘show,’ is outrageous. If they want to exclude credible underdogs, they can go do that in another state, not here."
The New Hampshire Republican Party not only agrees that Republican candidates Ron Paul and Duncan Hunter should have been included in Sunday’s Fox forum, the state party felt so strongly about it that it withdrew its affiliation [2] with the forum prior to the event taking place. In a statement released the day before the forum, New Hampshire Republican Party Chairman Fergus Cullen explained: "The first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary serves a national purpose by giving all candidates an equal opportunity on a level playing field. Only in New Hampshire do lesser known, lesser funded underdogs have a fighting chance to establish themselves as national figures. Consistent with that tradition, we believe all recognized major candidates should have an equal opportunity to participate in pre-primary debates and forums."
Cullen added that "this principle applies to tonight’s debates on ABC as well as Sunday’s planned forum on FOX" and that Paul and Hunter "should be included in the FOX forum on Sunday evening." The New Hampshire Republican Party tried to persuade Fox to include the snubbed candidates but to no avail, resulting in the state party’s withdrawal from the forum.
[2]A letter sent to Fergus Cullen by 23 current and former New Hampshire Republican state representatives advocated even stronger action. The reps, led in this effort by state Rep. Paul Ingbretson, recommended not only that the state party withdraw from the forum in the event Fox did not back down, but even urged that the invited candidates be asked to back out. Cullen did not go that far in his statement, and none of the five invited candidates — Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee, John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Fred Thompson — withdrew.
Fox’s exclusion of Congressman Ron Paul is particularly egregious. Not only does Paul draw large and enthusiastic crowds on the campaign trail, not only does he enjoy a bigger Internet presence than any of his fellow Republican candidates, and not only has his campaign raised almost $20 million in the last quarter, but he reached the double-digit threshold in the Iowa caucus, where he trounced Fox forum invitee Giuliani.
Also, a Rasmussen poll [3] released on January 4 showed Paul in third place in the New Hampshire primary at 14 percent, ahead of three of the Fox forum’s invitees — Huckabee, Giuliani, and Thompson. Other polls show Paul lower in New Hampshire but still ahead of at least one of the forum’s invitees.
But, generally speaking, the major media still portray Ron Paul as a dark-horse, fringe candidate who has no chance of winning and who at best could play the role of "spoiler." Who wants to back a spoiler, especially when the spoiler could cause one of the less desirable candidates to win the primary or caucus? Is it surprising, therefore, that many people who otherwise would vote for a particular candidate opt for someone else instead? This, of course, is exactly the reaction the biased media elitists hope for when they attempt to marginalize and dismiss — or outright ignore — certain candidates.
Considering the way Ron Paul has been portrayed by the media at large, and also considering that he has gotten relatively little publicity compared to the media-anointed "top-tier" candidates, his 10-percent showing in Iowa is actually quite good. But don’t hold your breath for the major media to trumpet that fact, since that would conflict with the image the media wants to portray of Paul. There are exceptions, of course, such as the fair and respectful treatment Paul receives from CNN’s Wolf Blitzer [4], who credited Paul with a "solid showing" in Iowa. But other media outlets did not even mention how Ron Paul fared in Iowa, or if they did they cast the 10-percent performance in a poor light. Never mind that Giuliani, the supposed frontrunner nationally, got only 3 percent in Iowa.
Though Wolf Blitzer treats Paul fairly on his "Situation Room" program, CNN as a whole is another story. The night of the Iowa caucus, for instance, CNN showed a pie chart [5] with various pieces of the pie labeled for the top-performing candidates. But one sizeable chunk of the pie was not labeled, and that chunk was where Ron Paul’s 10-percent was hidden. Unless viewers knew otherwise they might assume that Ron Paul did not get any votes. And that of course was the idea!
Much more could be said about how the media make and break "viable" candidates — from giving favored, albeit largely unknown, candidates gobs of publicity to catapult them into "top-tier" status, to smearing disfavored candidates who catch on despite earlier, more subtle, attempts to ignore or dismiss them. The media treatment of Ron Paul is just one example of the latter. Examples of the former include the media packaging [5] of Democrat Barack Obama and Republican Mike Huckabee as viable candidates for change, even though they generally offer the same old policies.
However, the effectiveness of the media in making or breaking "viable" candidates, though still potent as is demonstrated by the Obama and Huckabee successes, is not what it what used to be, thanks to the Internet. Through the Internet, the Ron Paul campaign has been able to get its message out and to attract a legion of supporters and a flow of dollars that otherwise would not have been possible. In the case of the Fox snub, Ron Paul aired his own one-hour alternative forum with a group of undecided New Hampshire voters. And in general, Ron Paul has the resources to buy TV time and to do the other things needed to run a serious presidential campaign. But whether he can convince the man on the street that he really has a shot at overcoming the "I like Ron Paul but he can’t win" media-cultivated mentality remains to be seen.
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