It is gratifying to see all the print coverage from the major networks this morning of Ron Paul's plan to cut one trillion dollars from the budget and balance the budget within three years, but where were was the TV coverage? by Walt Thiessen
(libertarian)
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Apparently, being one of the leading candidates for the Republican nomination does not quality Ron Paul for network TV coverage when he proposes one trillion dollars in very specific budget cuts and a plan to balance the federal budget within three years, despite the fact that his campaign set up a press conference and created their own, online TV coverage. Being consistently in third place in the polls, well ahead of the other candidates is not enough. The reason, of course, is simple. The media blackout of the Paul campaign continues, albeit in a modified form.
Nevermind the fact that no other candidate for president dares to be as specific as Paul about specific spending cuts. Nevermind that the networks themselves for years have decried the fact that candidates don't ever present real, specific solutions to the seemingly overwhelming problems that face the nation. None of that matters to the TV network executives. All that matters to them now is that they've decided that Ron Paul cannot win the Republican nomination, so there is no point in presenting his solutions to the public, regardless of whether they're good or not.
Of course, the network execs didn't want to totally piss off the millions of Paul supporters, so they did provide some print converage on their websites. How very generous of them. One might almost applaud them except for one small fact: they are TV networks, not print networks. Their audiences watch their offerings primarily on the boob tube, not by reading the Internet.
CBS News, for example, wrote up a straight-forward report on Paul's proposals, but they didn't think it worthwhile to broadcast Paul describing those proposals. At least they provided a link to their story on the home page of their website. ABC News did manage to make the Paul announcement newsworthy enough to make the news on their website, but they relegated it to a blog entry. The same held true for CNN, who had a number of links to other political snippets unrelated to Paul on their home page, including an extremely important and relevant article that reports Sen. John McCain saying that President Obama's bus is ugly (I'm sure glad CNN is right on top of these things!), but showed nothing there about the Paul proposal. NBC News did report Paul's plan on their website as a news story, but good luck finding it on their home page. And, of course, none of the other cable news networks bothered to broadcast with their cameras, either.
At some point, the networks will need to be shaken awake to notice that there is a Republican candidate whose proposals actually appeal across the board and do not limit their appeal to the right. The legions of Paul supporters are making that happen in little ways, showing their friends and neighbors who Ron Paul really is (rather than the look-down-your-nose-at-that-flake presentation the networks give him), and now those friends and neighbors are seeing for themselves how appallingly biased and undemocratic those networks really are. Perhaps if enough people notice, the networks themselves might change their tune. One can only hope.
In the meantime, the TV networks prefer to fawn over a Federal Reserve supporter and former Fed governor named Herman Cain, who doesn't think the Fed needs to be audited and who doesn't believe that the Fed and the monetary system had anything to do with the financial crisis of 2008, or with any other financial crisis in modern history. They prefer to build public excitement about a man who proposes to raise taxes on the poor and working classes with a plan that will never stay at the 9% level, since politicians have never been averse to raising taxes whenever they want to spend more money. They prefer to ignore the fact that the two-faced neo-con wing of the tea parties have abandoned all pretence about "no new taxes" in order to embrace this wolf in sheep's clothing, and they like the idea of putting a central banker in the White House. God save us all from the networks' public opinion manipulations of the electorate.
The Ron Paul campaign continues, and his numbers of supporters continue to build also, slowly but surely. One can only hope that they will reach critical mass in time for the Iowa caucuses.
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