http://www.brillscontent.com/2001feb/features/nader.shtml
February 2001
My Untold Story
What if we threw a presidential campaign and nobody came? The Green Party's
candidate explains how he tried to engage the press, and why it didn't work.
By Ralph Nader
On the afternoon of February 21, 2000, I declared my candidacy for the Green
Party presidential nomination at The Madison Hotel in Washington, D.C.,
before an impressive assemblage of media. All the major television networks,
including CNN and PBS, were on hand, as were radio and print reporters. My
announcement speech focused on the "democracy gap" in our country, which
helps explain the gap between many systemic injustices and lost
opportunities, on the one hand, and the solutions that are ignored because of
an excessive concentration of power and wealth.
That evening, none of the broadcast networks reported that I had entered the
race. The next morning The New York Times ran a short article, and the day
after that The Washington Post carried a squib.
Challenging the entrenched two-party system under a winner-take-all rule is
akin to climbing a sheer cliff with a slippery rope. Without instant runoff
voting or proportional representation -- voting mechanisms that can allow
smaller political parties to share in government -- it is a task far more
difficult than in any other Western democracy. The Republican and Democratic
parties command the money and wield the power to exclude other candidates
from the presidential debates, and to erect formidable statutory barriers
against competitors trying to get on the ballot in many states. But perhaps
the most insurmountable obstacle of all is the virtual lock enjoyed by the
two major parties on coverage in the national media.
The national press's insistence on focusing its attention on the horse race
between the two major-party candidates creates a catch-22 for any third-party
candidate who wants to inject previously ignored issues into the campaign
dialogue: Without coverage, you can't make headway in the polls. And a poor
showing in the polls in turn distances the media from the campaign.
Meanwhile, the issues your campaign seeks to address remain below the radar
of the major candidates and the campaign press. Having worked with the print
and broadcast media throughout my career as a consumer advocate, I had no
illusions when I launched my campaign about the difficulties I would face in
convincing reporters, editors, and producers for the major news outlets that
my candidacy deserved their coverage.
As it turns out, the major media organizations did cover our campaign. But
they consistently viewed it as an occasional feature story -- a colorful,
narrative dispatch from the trail with a marginal candidate -- rather than a
news story about my proposals or campaign events designed to focus attention
on our agenda. During the months when I was traveling through the 50 states,
the local press usually reported on the visits, but the national print and
electronic media didn't. Instead, they'd parachute in a reporter to travel
with us for a few days and file a profile of our campaign that focused on
personality and the so-called spoiler issue rather than on substance. We were
never a news beat, even when the margins narrowed between Al Gore and George
W. Bush during the last month and made our voters more consequential.
Back in the spring, however, hope sprung eternal. In April, a Zogby America
poll put us at 5 percent nationwide. Our audiences were growing, and we had
an exhaustive agenda that was of compelling concern to millions of Americans.
We supported a living wage; stronger trade-union organization laws; universal
health insurance; strong environmental measures; redirection of public
budgets from corporate welfare to neighborhood and community needs; a
crackdown on corporate crime against consumers, especially those in ghettos;
public funding of election campaigns; protection of the small-farm economy
from giant agribusiness abuses; abolition of the death penalty; an
alternative to the failed war on drugs; and a military and foreign policy
that wages peace, justice, and democracy instead of preparing for war against
no known major enemies.
These were issues that, over the years, many news outlets had reported on,
investigated, and editorialized about. Bush and Gore were either ignoring the
subjects altogether or taking positions opposite mine, and their respective
records of failing to address them -- well known to the media for years --
gave further credibility to our agenda. We had a long track record, and we
weren't offering easy rhetoric. Finally, as the weeks unfolded, the
Nader/LaDuke ticket was qualifying on 44 state ballots, far exceeding any
potential Electoral College majority.
Equipped with these arguments, I paid a visit in May to Jim Roberts, the
political editor of The New York Times. Unlike some reporters and editors at
the Times, Roberts appeared genuinely open to our requests for more regular
coverage. I asked him whether the Times had any overall newsworthiness
criteria for covering significant third-party candidates, and he allowed that
there were no specific standards, implying that Times editors made judgment
calls as events unfolded. When I asked for examples of what would qualify as
a newsworthy event, he replied, "If you do anything with Pat Buchanan, or
when you campaign in California, I'd be interested." At the time, California
was considered a must-win state for Gore and favorable territory for our
candidacy.
In the following weeks, I put this question about newsworthiness to the many
newspaper editorial boards that I met with around the country and to other
reporters, editors, and producers. The responses were either noncommittal or
related to our impact on the Gore-Bush competition.
No matter what our campaign tried or accomplished, the media remained stuck
in a cultural rut, covering the horse race and political tactics of Gore and
Bush rather than the issues. This was the case in the reporting, the
editorials, the television punditry, the columns, and even many of the
political cartoons. We sent open letters to Bush and Gore, challenging them
(in a nice way) to take positions that would enrich the presidential campaign
dialogue -- on farm policy, genetic engineering, corporate welfare, the
living wage, even simply urging all members of Congress to post their voting
records in an easily searchable fashion on their websites, as none currently
does. There were no responses from Bush and Gore, and there was never, to my
knowledge, one media attempt to elicit such.
The Washington Post was in one of the deepest ruts, to the point of amusement
in our campaign office. Although the Post provided ample space (750 words or
so) one day in early summer for an article headlined "Gore, Family Taking It
Easy in N.C.," it barely took notice when we filled New York City's Madison
Square Garden in October with one of our rallies. Nor could the Post find a
reporter to cover one of our press conferences -- held right across the
street from the paper's headquarters -- that exposed the phony crisis of
Social Security being peddled, for different reasons, by Bush and Gore.
(Being a news-reporting organization, The Associated Press sent the story
over its wires.) Unlike the Times, however, the Post did invite me to an
editorial board meeting, from which political correspondent David S. Broder
produced an accurate article the next day. And the Post's op-ed page, again
unlike the Times -- which delivered a string of hysterical editorials
accusing my campaign of "cluttering" the field between Bush and Gore --
invited me to write an op-ed piece. But by and large, the Post covered the
campaign with a feature, not a news, mentality, as did the other major
papers.
The Post's Dana Milbank, for instance, followed us in California for four
days in August and produced a story for the paper's "Style" section that made
much of the fact that radical leftists don't think I'm sufficiently committed
to identity politics, that the host of a San Diego fund-raiser served "soy
cheese quesadillas," and that we stayed at a wealthy friend's house in Santa
Barbara. Milbank didn't, however, mention any of our policy proposals or, for
instance, the discussion I led in San Diego on border issues, at which he was
present. He ended his visit with our campaign by driving north to San
Francisco to, he said, meet up with some of his Yale buddies before catching
a flight. Had he stayed on, he could have attended a meeting we held to show
support for California's migrant farmworkers.
There were reporters, like Maria Recio of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and
Tom Squitieri of USA Today, who saw early on the significance of our campaign
both directly for its agenda and indirectly for its impact on the major-party
candidates, and who persuaded their editors to allow more regular travel with
the campaign. Their sense of the campaign's importance was shared by Tim
Russert of NBC's Meet the Press, who invited me on his show five times, and
Chris Matthews of MSNBC's Hardball With Chris Matthews, who had me on three
times.
We kept trying. Bill Hillsman, the Minneapolis media consultant whose ads
helped Jesse Ventura win Minnesota's gubernatorial race in 1998, produced our
first political advertisement, a parody of the MasterCard "priceless" ad. It
received widespread accolades in the media for its accuracy, its humor, and
its focus on getting included in the debates. MasterCard's foolish lawsuit
for copyright infringement only focused more attention on the ad and the
campaign it represented.
Our press office suggested issuing immediate responses to stands taken by the
major candidates. We would, for example, offer a prompt comment on positions
taken by Gore or Bush on rising energy prices -- a topic we have worked on
for many years -- but nary a paragraph would appear in the lead stories
reflecting our response or alternative proposal.
Our next campaign step, one that we believed would surely catapult the ticket
to more regular national news coverage, was holding what we liked to call
Super Rallies. Starting with a jam-packed Portland Coliseum, we launched a
series of rallies held in coliseums in Minneapolis, Seattle, Boston, Chicago,
New York City, Oakland, Long Beach, and Washington, D.C. The audiences, which
paid for tickets (starting at $7) to the events, ranged from around 9,000 to
15,000 people, and the events received good local media coverage.
Having by far the largest paid political rallies of any presidential
candidate, however, still did not break through the national media's focus on
the horse race, though it did encourage more questions about my being a
"spoiler." The question became so repetitive that the reporters would preface
themselves by saying, "I know you've been asked about this a thousand times"
before asking me how I felt about possibly causing Al Gore to lose the
election. I would reply that only Al Gore can defeat Al Gore, and he's been
doing a pretty good job at that. Then I would add that we are trying to build
a long-range political reform movement to dislodge the control of our
government from the grip of the permanent corporate government in Washington,
D.C., represented by more than 16,000 lobbyists swarming over the city, with
their nearly 1,600 corporate political action committees and soft-money
contributions, fueling both parties with equal-opportunity corruption.
Still, if the major news outlets really believed that we had a chance of
taking the election out of Gore's hands (in the last weeks of the campaign,
one radio reporter even asked me how it felt to be the most powerful
politician in the country, implying that I was about to hand the election to
Bush), they didn't reflect that in their coverage. We had rented a campaign
van with 14 seats to accommodate an expected increase in the number of
reporters traveling with us. Needless to say, we had empty seats in the van.
Notwithstanding rigorous campaigning in urban, suburban, and rural areas,
there was no way to reach the public without getting into the presidential
debates. Despite editorials in nearly a dozen major newspapers urging my
inclusion, not to mention several national polls indicating that the majority
of the public wanted me to participate, the Commission on Presidential
Debates (CPD) limited the debates to the Democratic and Republican
candidates. The CPD is a private corporation created by members of the
Republican and Democratic parties. It is co-chaired by a Republican and a
Democrat, has been funded largely by corporate funds (beer, auto,
telecommunications, tobacco, etc.), and holds the keys to reaching tens of
millions of voters who watch the presidential debates. The CPD sets the
format for each debate, selects the moderator (in this case, Jim Lehrer), and
sets the unrealistically high admission barrier of 15 percent support in
polls conducted by subsidiaries of the major media corporations -- the same
media corporations whose editors, reporters, and producers determine the
level of coverage for third-party candidates -- thus excluding any
competitors from the stage.
There was remarkably little news coverage of, or challenge to, this cleverly
exclusionary device, which indirectly places access to the debates in the
hands of the media. No coverage, no poll movement. Giving the CPD a monopoly
of access to the American people on behalf of the Republican and Democratic
candidates was a default of major magnitude by the television networks. Other
institutions could have sponsored multicandidate debates that Gore and Bush
could not have afforded to ignore. I wrote open letters to the networks and
to several industrial unions suggesting such sponsorship. The unions did not
reply, and Fox News Channel, ABC, and MSNBC sent noncommittal responses or
offered unacceptable alternatives that didn't include participation by Bush
and Gore. Our efforts in this regard received no coverage or commentary.
Given the media's largely showcase coverage of the two major candidates,
redundantly reporting the same mantras and slogans day after day, the CPD's
shutdown role was crucially destructive of what could have been a more
diverse, competitive, and interesting presidential campaign year. The CPD has
learned what being in the debates did for John Anderson in 1980, Ross Perot
in 1992, and Jesse Ventura (on the state level) in 1998. It was not about to
advance the political visibility of any more third-party or independent
candidacies. This did not upset the commercial media very much, though it did
galvanize progressive community weeklies and independent media outlets into
