Courtesy of reason.com
Less than a day after falling four thousand votes shy of winning the Iowa Caucuses, Ron Paul is still hardly mentioned in the media. Third place is evidently not good enough to have your existence noted by American news and print media. But fourth, fifth and sixth places – the respective results of Gingrich, Perry and Bachmann – the media continuously report on the future of their campaigns. The mind-numbingly stupid cable news coverage has focused their reports on Romney, Santorum, Gingrich and Huntsman in New Hampshire, how Perry is focusing on South Carolina and how Bachmann has called it quits. But Ron Paul? There is no mention of him. He is not a serious candidate. He is not a serious candidate. He is unelectable. He is crazy. He is not a serious candidate. He is dangerous. If the media repeat themselves enough, maybe they believe it will become true, or perhaps at least dissuade the viewer from thinking about Paul’s ideology. The only time the media or the herd of pundits mention Ron Paul is to assure themselves and the viewers that he is not a viable candidate.
Although you may have not even noticed, former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson was once a Republican candidate for President, but he disappeared months ago. It started when CNN did not invite Johnson to one their early debates, citing national poll numbers as the reason. Johnson, one of the most popular governors in recent history, was just too obscure for them. Herman Cain, the former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, however, was not deemed too obscure for the media to acknowledge his candidacy and invite him to debates. Because the media for ignored him for so long, Johnson has now declared his intention of running for President on the Libertarian Party ticket. So why are the media so reticent in mentioning candidates with libertarian beliefs? Some believe the medias’ reticence is merely based on the fact that Paul and Johnson stray so far from the Republican platform that their candidacies are nullified because they are unelectable to Republican primary voters. If that were the case, however, then why the rising popularity and mainstreaming of their views that distinguish them from Republican orthodoxy? If their views are so farfetched and damaging to their electability as the media claim, then why did Ron Paul come so close in the Iowa Caucus? The answer, I fear, lies within the relationship between media conglomerates and government.
It is well known and widely understood that the political parties controlling government are highly stable and not subject to much change. The two-party system has existed in its current form since the dissolution of the Whig Party in 1856. Occasional third parties have sprouted up – namely the Bull Moose and Progressive Parties – but their purpose was little more than supporting and individual candidate, like Theodore Roosevelt and Robert La Follette respectively. Thus, two parties, the Democrats and Republicans, have dominated the control of American government for over a century and a half, meaning legislation comes from one of the two parties and very little input comes from outside this two-party duopoly. The Democratic Party and the Republican Party are both monolithic in their influence in government. The lack of diversity in political ideology is similar to that of media conglomerates that are owned and controlled by a few select mega-corporations. These select few corporations control most of what is printed on newspaper and broadcasted on television news. The journalists of these news corporations must get their information from government sources: the bureaucrats and politicians. According to Professor Thomas DiLorenzo, a study by University of Rochester economists William Meckling and Michael Jensen found “government had become so big and pervasive that your average journalist – even local news reporters – relied on government itself and all of its politicians and bureaucrats for most of the information that they “report”… Consequently, any news reporter who is too critical of the government agencies that he is reporting about risks being cut off from his information sources, the lifeblood of his career, which will then be ruined.”
Courtesy of blogspot.com
The same relationship helps explain the medias’ ignoring of Ron Paul and Gary Johnson. When Ron Paul talks about the unsustainable foreign wars and the secretive Federal Reserve cabal and its disastrous effect on the economy, those ideas are not representative of the Democratic and Republican duopoly. The potential Ron Pauls and Gary Johnsons of the political world thus represent a threat to the Washington two-party establishment and neither the Democrats nor Republican can afford these “outside the mainstream” ideas being addressed and debated in the media for fear of people supporting them. The relationship between big media corporations and big government has been articulated by many scholars, from social anarchist Noam Chomsky to Thomas DiLorenzo of the Mises Institute, and by conservative political consultants like Jack Burkman. It is important to keep this relationship in mind as the presidential election progresses and as news media essentially “pick” candidates by virtue of whom they choose to acknowledge.
Interesting links:
Jack Burkman on Ron Paul and the media
Thomas DiLorenzo on the media
