The lefty media critics at Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting issued a Barr Nader study Tuesday that says the three broadcast-network news divisions -- ABC, NBC and CBS -- have mentioned Barr and Nader a total of 31 times all year along. (In poor Nader's case, two of the mentions came when he was the punchline in jokes by late-night comedians that were included in newscasts.)
The study, which also mentions two lesser third-party candidacies (the Green Party's Cynthia McKinney and the Constitution Party's Chuck Baldwin, notes that the traditional network explanation for excluding everybody but Republicans and Democrats -- that they won't attract enough votes to make a difference -- "makes this outcome more or less a self-fulfilling prophecy." That's a fair point, though I'm not sure it's entirely correct: Until the bottom dropped out of the economy a few weeks ago, the election looked close and it's entirely conceivable that Nader or Barr could deprived one of the candidates of victory, as Nader arguably did to Al Gore in 2000.
Problem is no one is going to do anything about it, we've allowed the two party system to take total control and the media is just as responsible for that as the two parties are. They could cover these candidates if they were actually interested in real historic firsts or new ideas.
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