(Mainstream media institutions do this intentionally, but there are plenty of voters and commentators who are would-be supporters who sadly do it too.   – promoted by eli_beckerman)

Everyone knows that third party candidates have a rough time in the media, if not for the fact that outlets who favor Democrats or Republicans don’t like third parties, then simply because they think people are uninterested in hearing about them. And anyone who’s interested in seeing third parties do well in elections knows that this is somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy; news outlets don’t adequately cover third-party candidates, meaning fewer people hear about them, which in turn means that not many people end up voting for them on election day. We all know this to be an intrinsic reality of our democracy, but I’m staring at this first-hand, right now, and we all need to see it.  

If ever there was a perfect example of how the negative feedback system works in politics, this is it. As we know, WRKO had a debate with the leading three candidates in the governor’s race on the 16th, electing to ignore Jill Stein’s candidacy. A few questions got asked, a few men took jabs at each other, but it was for the most part a boring affair with several if not all candidates agreeing to the same exact thing on several occasions. Articles came out about the debate, some reporting that Jill Stein hadn’t been invited, a few even publishing quotes about her feelings on the debate. But what are the post-debate ramifications of this? For that, we’ll need to take a look at two things: first, the Suffolk University poll from late May, and secondly, an article on “All Politics is Local”, the South Coast political blog.

First, the Suffolk poll. On May 25th, Suffolk University released their second poll concerning the gubernatorial race. Their research had found that while Patrick’s lead was increasing and Baker and Cahill were falling behind, Jill Stein’s share had more than doubled, bringing her to 8% of the vote. Though that doesn’t seem like much, a clearer picture emerges when you consider that they also asked people if they had ever heard of her in the first place. Of those being polled, only fourty percent had heard of her, meaning that of those who had, she was in fact polling at 20%. This means that if she was known to every one of the 500 people in their poll, Jill Stein would not only be polling at competitive numbers many points above Tim Cahill, but she would be making a serious run on both Baker and Patrick.

Now let’s look at the effects of not including Stein in the WRKO debate. For this, we turn to a recent blog post on the “All Politics is Local” blog. They have an article up that talks about the debate and ends with this sentence: “A fourth party candidate who is not polling competitively – Jill Stein of the Green-Rainbow Party – is also running for governor.” What are they really doing with that sentence? They are, whether inadvertently or not, trivializing Jill’s campaign by mentioning the only information on her with respect to the debate that they had. Now people who read this blog will see this and digest that trivialization and possibly dismiss her campaign without even hearing her message and giving her a chance. It start with small blogs and makes it way up to larger news sources, and we see this with these outlets giving Jill only glancing coverage, and extremely non-in-depth coverage at that. So at the heart of it, it’s these act of exclusion that fulfill their own prophecy, that being to create the notion that Jill Stein is a candidate not worth hearing from or thinking about. It results in fewer people thinking about her, fewer news outlets covering her, and fewer voters who would agree with her ever getting a chance to hear her message, forcing them to choose between the lesser of three evils come November.

We really can’t let this happen. When it comes down to it, anyone who cares about democracy and the democratic process, a process we hold in such high regard that there are those who think every country in the world should follow our lead, should be calling out media outlets like WKRO who undermine that very process by electing to hurt a candidate like this. We need to write letters, call programming directors, and really demand that all voices be heard. Until we do that, we don’t have a true democracy, but merely the illusion of one.