Was Nader "Blacked Out" by the Media?

After months of virtual invisibility in the popular press, Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader became a huge story in recent weeks as the national media noticed his modestly successful Third Party campaign could threaten Democrat Al Gore's chances in a tight election.

Yet for months, as his late-summer and early-fall barnstorming appearances drew thousands of enthusiastic supporters across the country, he earned only light, infrequent coverage in the mainstream press. According to the Center for Media and Public Affairs, ABC, CBS and NBC combined had given Nader only one minute of speaking time on their network evening news from Labor Day to Oct. 22, compared with 23 minutes for Gore and 22 for Republican George W. Bush, and the Washington Post relegated their one major feature on him to the style section.

Nader has called the coverage of his campaign a "media blackout," dramatic words that suggest a boardroom full of media executives rubbing their palms together, gleefully plotting his electoral demise. Yet several prominent media critics and some of the journalists who have covered him agree Nader is the subject of a news blackout, disagreeing only on the reasons for it.

By conventional journalistic standards of newsworthiness, they said, Nader doesn't deserve extensive coverage because he has very little chance of winning - a bind all Third Party candidates face in a winner-take-all electoral system.

"I guess he has encountered what all Third Party candidates encounter, which is this Catch-22, being that they're not considered significant candidates until they get coverage, and they won't become significant unless they get coverage," said Maffie Ritsch, a researcher at the Los Angeles Times national political desk, who has covered Third Parties for the paper.

"I don't know whose responsibility it is to break that. Is it the candidate's, who has to be charismatic and speak to issues that pique voters' interest? Or is it newspapers and TV and radio who need to initially cover everyone in the field and then evaluate everyone in the campaign who merits (further) coverage."

Jeff Cohen, founder of the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), has been analyzing media coverage of the presidential race and was astonished at his own research suggesting Gore garnered at least thirty major stories for every one on Nader.

"Gore certainly doesn't have thirty times the support that Nader has. The fact is, if [Nader] had ever gotten anything close to the percentage of coverage as his percentage in the polls, his polls numbers would be up," said Cohen. Support for Nader, who has been famous for more than three decades as a consumer rights crusader, has hovered around 5 percent in national polls for several months. Gore's has fluctuated around the 40-45 percent mark.

"I'm not naive, but this has shocked me -- that a figure this famous and respected should get this little coverage," said Cohen.

Tom Squitieri, a national political correspondent for USA Today, said he's "had enormous difficulty getting minor party coverage into the paper," and that the media has been very slow to realize that Nader's 2000 campaign - unlike his flaccid 1996 run -- is not just a token candidacy.

"Reporters did not recognize the very unique potential between the marriage of Nader, who had national recognition, and the Green Party and its loose association of community-based activism groups. He's unlike any other candidate in the sense that he has national renown and has a track record as a reformer," said Squitieri. "Nader is talking about issues that the other candidates don't bring up, and those issues really resonate with a lot of voters."

"Let's be clear, every utterance by every candidate does not deserve a full story, but some do," he said. "Nader is different, he has a consumer record unmatched by any member of congress, and if he had that record and been a member of congress, he would've gotten covered."