{"id":13989,"date":"2011-08-21T20:05:45","date_gmt":"2011-08-22T03:05:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=13989"},"modified":"2011-08-22T07:04:32","modified_gmt":"2011-08-22T14:04:32","slug":"leave-it-to-the-voters-to-decide-who-is-a-viable-candidate-on-the-medias-non-coverage-of-ron-paul","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=13989","title":{"rendered":"Leave it to the voters to decide who is a viable candidate: On the media&#8217;s non-coverage of Ron Paul"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"575\" height=\"353\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube-nocookie.com\/embed\/3EY5Ofcxjs0\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/motherjones.com\/kevin-drum\/2011\/08\/ron-pauls-15-minutes-are\">Kevin Drum<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/plainblogaboutpolitics.blogspot.com\/2011\/08\/ron-paul-michele-bachmann-and-press.html\">Jonathan Bernstein<\/a> say essentially the same thing regarding the press deciding not to cover Ron Paul&#8217;s campaign, which I&#8217;d sum up as:<em> It&#8217;s obvious Paul has no chance of being the next President, so the press is right to not cover his campaign.<\/em> <\/p>\n<p>But granting that Ron Paul can&#8217;t win, that doesn&#8217;t mean he shouldn&#8217;t be covered. Candidates who &#8212; like Paul &#8212; might plausibly bring issues in the race that would otherwise be ignored, or force their opponents (a few of whom might well become President) to make arguments they wouldn&#8217;t otherwise, can have an important impact even if they can&#8217;t win. If the media was covering Ron Paul as eagerly as they cover Michele Bachmann, that could force other candidates &#8212; including &#8220;real&#8221; candidates like Romney &#8212; to more explicitly discuss when they would and wouldn&#8217;t consider the US going to war to be justified. That&#8217;s useful information for the public to know &#8212; and it&#8217;s not a question we can rely on mainstream journalists to persistently badger Romney with.<\/p>\n<p>Or maybe that wouldn&#8217;t happen, and no matter how much public noise Paul makes, Romney would dodge the issue. We really can&#8217;t know for sure. But voters should get a chance to find out, rather than the media deciding that it&#8217;s not worth the bother.<\/p>\n<p>The press&#8217; role should be to communicate the election contest that&#8217;s going on <em>right now<\/em> &#8212; not to gatekeeper the news according to the election contest they believe will happen in the future. <\/p>\n<p>Obviously, it&#8217;s necessary for the press to make some gatekeeping decisions; giving equal coverage to everyone who can get their name on a ballot, even if they&#8217;re polling at .00001% and have only raised a hundred bucks they got from their mom, would turn press coverage into an incomprehensible mishmash of hundreds of candidates.<\/p>\n<p>But we should see gatekeeping is a necessary evil, which journalists should try to minimize. Above all, journalists should be striving &#8212; not for canniness, which is unfortunately the thing most campaign journalists seem to value most &#8212; but for <em>modesty<\/em>. That means that journalists shouldn&#8217;t decide things for voters; journalists should not be saying &#8220;I&#8217;m so canny and smart that I know this candidate can&#8217;t win, so why bother reporting on the campaign?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>As much as practically possible, journalists should provide their audience with the full story, and leave it to the voters to decide who is and isn&#8217;t a viable candidate.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know exactly what the threshold of newsworthiness should be. But Paul came within inches of winning an event that the mainstream media considers significant. He&#8217;s polling <a href=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/blogs\/weigel\/2011\/08\/17\/poll_ron_paul_bests_bachmann_in_new_hampshire.html\">in third in New Hampshire<\/a> (4% above media darling Michelle Bachmann). Any reasonable threshold based, not on canniness, but on giving readers and viewers what they need to decide, would say that Ron Paul&#8217;s campaign is newsworthy.<\/p>\n<p>(None of this is to deny that I think Ron Paul has substantively awful views on many issues.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Kevin Drum and Jonathan Bernstein say essentially the same thing regarding the press deciding not to cover Ron Paul&#8217;s campaign, which I&#8217;d sum up as: It&#8217;s obvious Paul has no chance of being the next President, so the press is &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=13989\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[135,27,54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crossposted-on-tada","category-elections-and-politics","category-media-criticism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13989"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13989\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14021,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13989\/revisions\/14021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}