It’s no mystery why journalists generally ignore outsider candidates: We don’t want to lend credence to people with no chance, while giving short shrift to those who may actually win.
(The challenge of resource allocation is real, too, but it affects all coverage, not only politics, so I’m not addressing it here.)
What bothers me about this justification is that it assumes the only thing that matters in a political contest is who wins. Issues, in other words, are not very important.
And, frankly, we have no trouble covering the front-runners enough, we have trouble covering them well.
It’s likely, for example, that far more Americans have seen the Howard Dean shouting episode than have heard his thoughts on education, taxes, or health care.
Still, they’ve heard something about him, which may not be true of Dennis Kucinich or Al Sharpton. As for Carol Moseley Braun, she rarely got mentioned at all until she quit the race. It was as if, with one black candidate already in the race, Moseley Braun was doubly irrelevant. Does anybody else find that shameful?
What concerns me most is that in labeling candidates irrelevant we participate in and may indeed help ensure their irrelevancy.
In labeling candidates irrelevant we participate in and may indeed help ensure their irrelevancy.I don’t want to overstate our power in this. Media did not create the two-party system, the vast role of money in elections, or even an old-boy network that sidelines non-old-boys.
But we’ve accepted those realities, largely without question, and all too often failed in our duty to not only report the news, but to safeguard democracy.
Now, don’t roll your eyes at me. The First Amendment guarantees our rights for a reason. In theory, at least, we are best situated to inform and engage the citizenry. Why should we be constitutionally protected if not to ensure we have the latitude we need to help sustain and perpetuate democracy?
And how do we do that if we make broad assumptions about which candidate is deserving of our attention?
No, we are not responsible for a political system out of whack. What we are responsible for is our laziness, and our willingness to swallow and regurgitate conventional wisdom, while failing utterly to question where that “wisdom” comes from, whom it serves, and what its impact is on the people of this country.
What do I mean by conventional wisdom? It’s the web of assumptions we make to justify dismissing certain candidates as unimportant.
Conventional wisdom says we are not ready for a woman president. It says certain candidates are too liberal to have a broad-based appeal. It says if a candidate does not reach a certain threshold of money, he or she cannot be a serious contender.
Now, it is possible that every single one of these assumptions is true. But we can’t know if they’re true if we are not willing to challenge them. And when we fail to do so, we help maintain, support, and perpetuate the status quo.
We are not ready for a woman president? We have never been ready for a woman anything until some individual woman busted through the glass ceiling. Were we ready for Carol Moseley Braun to go to the Senate? And yet she was elected. Were we ready for Madeleine Albright or Condoleeza Rice to go all over the world? And yet they were appointed.
In the end, it didn’t matter whether we were ready because somebody decided to ignore conventional wisdom and, in each of these cases, made history. A woman will go to the Oval Office, whether we are ready when it happens, or not.
As for Dennis Kucinich and Al Sharpton: What makes them unelectable? Each has support. Each brings a unique perspective to the political arena. Are they too radical and too cash-poor to mount meaningful campaigns? They certainly are if we don’t bother to cover them.
Monetary issues aside, we seem to assume that Americans are not ready for radical change, while recent elections indicate otherwise. It seems to me, Americans are desperately hungry for candidates who do not fit the tired two-party mold.
How else do you explain Ross Perot?
And Ralph Nader’s role in the 2000 elections still reverberates. So many Democrats are scared he’ll siphon off voters who otherwise would vote democratic this year, they’ve mounted a campaign imploring him not to run! To me, that alone proves his significance in the presidential race, should he choose to participate.
What would happen if we chucked conventional wisdom for a few months and just reported who was running and what they were saying?
I don’t think anybody would go out of business for lack of readers, listeners, or viewers. Indeed, some folks who have dismissed us as irrelevant might just begin to rethink that assessment.
With our current reputation, we sure don’t have anything to lose.
