(This one says it all. – promoted by eli_beckerman)

Originally posted in South End News

by Shirley Kressel, contributing writer

Wednesday Sep 8, 2010

Democracy depends on a fully informed electorate. But our media have decided to be the gatekeepers of information and narrow our political options according to their expectations, as if voting were a horse-race and accurate prediction were the goal instead of expression of public will. This enclosure of the journalistic commons coincides with the increasingly concentrated ownership of the media outlets by powerful corporations with massive financial interests to promote to the government and the public.

No wonder we keep getting the same old, same old from our government; we keep whiplashing between the narrow Republicrat/Demican choices we’re offered, voting NO again and again and hoping this will send the message and get us what we want. It won’t.

Jill Stein, the Green-Rainbow candidate for governor, is the only alternative to the three “old boys” of the ‘same old’ network, incumbent Deval Patrick, Charles Baker, and Tim Cahill. But our media chieftains have decided that three old boys are enough choice for the people of Massachusetts.

First, Emily Rooney invited Stein as a guest on her Feb. 8 Greater Boston TV broadcast and told her that, yes, journalists are “the editors” who are entitled to decide which candidates are included in the public discussions. In other words, the media really should be the message.

Then, disgraced former state representative radio host Tom Finneran gerrymandered her off his June 16 candidates’ debate. After some fuss, he invited her as a guest on his show – where he and his co-host could talk over her and toss her caller questions.

And then, on August 10, Brian McGrory of The Boston Globe sent a letter to Stein, who had qualified for the gubernatorial ballot with 16,000 signatures (only 10,000 are required), inviting her to participate in a pair of public debates sponsored by “a consortium of Boston news media outlets,” including The Globe, WCVB-TV (Channel 5), WHDH-TV (Channel 7), WGBH-TV (Channel 2), New England Cable News (NECN), WBUR, WTTK-FM, WBZ-AM, and Gatehouse Media. I name them because of this: the invitation set conditions for participation, the most troubling of which was to have raised at least $100,000 in campaign donations between January 1 and October 1. Even WGBH and WBUR, the non-profit public-interest stations, put their names to this outrage.

The fund-raising requirement is a scathing indictment of our fourth estate, which should be diligently pouring the most possible information out to the voters. Yet they are conspiring to filter political debate through their own private set of criteria for legitimacy – based on campaign donations, that well-known root of all political evil. If anything, it should be the candidates with the corporately laden war chests who should be disqualified, since they already have conflicts of interest. What we desperately need are public officials who are, as Shirley Chisholm put it decades ago, “unbought and unbossed.”

According to the state donation records website, from January 1 to Sept 2, Cahill collected about $650,000 of his total $6 million on record since 2002; Patrick, $2.3 million, of his total $18 million, and Baker, $3.2 million of his total $5.4 million. Whew! All the guys safely qualify! Only Stein – who is refusing to take money from lobbyists – is under $100,000. Coincidence? I think not. This isn’t a neutral, principled criterion; it’s deliberate discrimination.

Furthermore, according to the Stein campaign, she is being excluded from the WBZ radio debate being held by Dan Rae on September 14. The station managers said that listeners would be confused by hearing four candidate voices on the air at once. What: Her voice would be confused with that of the three men? Why not exclude a male candidate or two? That would reduce confusion — in more ways than one! When Stein protested, WBZ offered her an hour interview on another date: separate but not equal, since the listenership and media coverage for a separate interview would not begin to make up for exclusion from the candidates’ event. WBZ would treat her as a commentator, rather than a candidate.

The Globe has relented on its heretofore exclusionary news coverage by acknowledging in an August 18 editorial that Stein’s “contribution” to the August 16 Cape Wind debate (sponsored by Suffolk University and MassINC) brought a “thoughtful, distinct perspective the voters deserve to hear.” (They also mentioned Cahill, whose name the editors probably threw in to obfuscate their inappropriate censorship effort). The editorial closes with a gracious allowance that Cahill and Stein — two fully ballot-qualified candidates, remember! — finally, in the Globe’s elevated opinion, “earned a place on future stages.”

Stein put it best in her August 22 letter to several newspaper editorial boards:

“All candidates that have qualified for the ballot under the election laws of the Commonwealth should be invited to participate in debates that use the public airways. We also think that fair treatment of all candidates is to be expected from the media corporations that are taking advantage of the privileges our society accords to journalistic enterprises. Those privileges are based on an assumption that journalists will contribute to the free and open dialogue that is essential to a healthy democracy. Journalists should refuse to be parties to any attempt to restrict the flow of information that voters need and deserve.

“It is impossible to come up with criteria for debate exclusion that do not reflect some bias regarding whose political views and political aspirations are valid. The only sound principle is to include all candidates in debates, and let the voters, who will then be fully informed regarding their choices, decide which candidates are worthy of their consideration.”

Shirley Kressel is a landscape architect and urban designer, and one of the founders of the Alliance of Boston Neighborhoods. She can be reached at Shirley.Kressel@verizon.net.