US Poll Debate Skirts Issues
Dasu Krishnamoorty
Major American media have failed to project issues closely related to the November 2nd election, issues that are agitating the minds of millions of voters. What mainstream TV and print media reveal to their audiences is as limited as their ownership determines. This truth comes home to countless Americans as they eagerly wait their turn to cast their vote in the presidential elections two weeks away. The TV debates between George Bush and John Kerry, their earlier campaigning and the electoral discourses in print and TV media have concealed several crucial and unresolved issues, treating the people to a structured TV spectacle. Voices and images of profound political learning remained unheard and unseen. The media have pushed to the periphery issues that are central to franchise and democracy. Beyond the world that the Democrats and Republicans represent is a universe of dissent and discontent that escapes mainstream media attention, thanks to the understanding between politics, media and the corporate domain.
Is the November election merely a matter between Bush and Kerry or are there other candidates? What happened to them and the messages they wanted to convey to the electorate? How candidates other than Democrats and Republicans have been prevented from entering the electoral mainland is a commentary on the state and range of mediated public debate. A look at the history of presidential debates will unravel how they are designed to keep an entire world of alternative view out of their orbit. A body called the Commission on Presidential Debates, jointly set up by Democrats and Republicans and funded by corporate sponsors, conducts the TV debates. They hijacked the CPD from a non-partisan League of Women Voters who ran the presidential debates up to 1988. Eleven pro-democracy civic groups - the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, The Center for Voting and Democracy, Common Cause, Democracy Matters, Democracy South, Judicial Watch, the National Voting Rights Institute, Open Debates, Public Campaign, Rock the Vote, and the Southern Voting Rights Project - jointly released a report recently titled "Deterring Democracy: How the Commission on Presidential Debates Undermines Democracy." The report says that the CPD runs the debates in the interests of national Republican and Democratic parties, not the American people.
The report says, "Such deceptive major party control severely harms our democracy. Candidates that voters want to see are then excluded; issues the American people want to hear about are often ignored; the debates have been turned into a series of glorified bipartisan news conferences, in which the candidates exchange memorized soundbites." Candidates other than Democrat or Republican are kept out by the simple device of insisting that they must have a mathematical possibility of obtaining enough electoral votes to be eligible to be a presidential candidate. This rules out participation of third party candidates, whose support depends on the public exposure they are able to achieve, in the TV debates. The American public was thus denied the views of leaders like Michael Badnarik (Libertarian), Ralph Nader (Independent), David Cobb (Green) and Michael Peroutka (Constitution). The US District Court called for the Federal Election Commission to investigate the CPD’s exclusion of minor parties from the debates.
But the media were silent when early this month Badnarik and Cobb were arrested at St. Louis for crossing the police lines to serve a show cause notice on the CPD. They even suppressed the fact that in comparison to Bush and Kerry who each enjoy 538 electoral votes in 51 states, Badnarik has 527 electoral votes in 49 states. Both Badnarik and Cobb were protesting peacefully against CPD’s failure to include them in the presidential debate. A man who is second only to Bush and Kerry in electoral support has received little or no space/time in the mainstream media. There was not a single soundbite about the arrest of Badnarik and Cobb on Fox News, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS and MSNBC. It is difficult to believe that the people who run the two main parties are not the same as those who run the media also.
Questions are also raised about the role of moderators: whether they have a moral responsibility for the democratic process and whether they (media persons like Jim Lehrer) should be accepting assignments from a body castigated by the judiciary. Freelance writer Ken Krayeske asks, "Does doing so compromise journalistic integrity, or at least the appearance of independence? I wonder whether Jim Lehrer signed the 32-page memorandum of understanding between the two parties that set the parameters for the debate. When questioned about signing it, Lehrer responded "no comment". How can we expect a journalist to ask hard questions if he won’t answer one?" John Hanchette, who teaches journalism at St. Bonaventure University, says, "The presidential debates increasingly smell like rig jobs with preconceived answers to cream-puff questions. We might as well ask Donald Trump to moderate or the candidates’ wives do the questioning." According to the League of Women Voters, who ran the presidential debates until 1988, it is the moderators’ responsibility to ensure that all the candidates have an equal opportunity to speak on each issue. What does ‘all the candidates’ mean? Does not it include a candidate with a mathematical chance of winning the presidency, that is, being on enough state ballots to garner sufficient votes to capture the election?
MediaChannel complains that media’s election coverage has dwindled in the last 20 years and the reporting that does occur tends to ignore issues in favor of thin media caricatures and the "horse race." Media for Democracy mobilizes citizens in an initiative to hold big media to standards for coverage that ensure voter education, airtime for DIVerse political perspectives and greater coverage of important election-year issues. World Socialist Website is more specific: The American media has barely reported the revelation, first made public on Sunday by Newsweek magazine, that the Bush administration initiated discussions on the legal issues involved in postponing the 2004 elections. Both the broadcast and print media have treated this unprecedented threat to democratic rights as a minor story, meriting only the most perfunctory reportage and no editorial comment.
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