Denver Post

All candidates are not created equal
By Sue O'Brien
Denver Post Editorial Page Editor

Sunday, October 20, 2002 - It is, as Westword media critic Michael Roberts has noted, a classic Catch-22: "Big media outlets won't cover minor parties unless they seem credible - but minor parties won't seem credible unless big media outlets cover them."

Roberts is right. Joseph Heller would have been in his element chronicling Libertarian, Green, American Constitution, Natural Law and Reform efforts to secure media attention for their runs for office.

It's gotta be frustrating. The sense of shared deprivation even forged an odd-couple marriage between Rick Stanley and Douglas Campbell, respectively the Libertarian and American Constitution candidates for U.S. Senate, who asked a federal judge to force The Post and other outlets to give them equal access to candidate debates. The Reform Party's Victor Good, meanwhile, took on the Allied Jewish Federation for limiting its influential candidate forum to hopefuls who show "significant" support - with "significant" meaning a 20 percent standing in the polls.

"Do various racial, ethnic or religious groups have to have a 20 percent showing to prove themselves 'significant,'?" asks Good, a candidate in the 7th Congressional District. "Is discrimination justified for any reason in this country?"

For the Greens' Sunny Maynard, it was a serious slight to be excluded from the candidates The Post considered endorsing for attorney general. Earlier in the season, her Green colleague Ken Seaman - hands down my favorite among all the "alternative party" folk this year - chided me for omitting him from a column on the race in the 1st CD, where he, Libertarian Kent Leonard and American Constitution candidate George Lilly linger in the shadows as Democrat Diana DeGette and Republican Ken Chlouber get the headlines.

I don't blame them for being mad. But I don't see a ready solution, either. I do know, though, that we're miles apart on our diagnoses of what's going on.

Almost to a person, minor-party activists are convinced that a conspiracy is at work: The moguls of the media are conniving with the Dems and GOP to concentrate power in those two parties alone.

But if such a deal with the devil has been made, the motive is less clear.

Obviously, the parties themselves want to hold down minor-party exposure: They don't want precious votes trickling away. Look what Ralph Nader did to Al Gore in Florida. The analysis gets murky, though, when you look at individual candidates. Third-party folks like to think major-party wannabes don't dare share the stage with pesky upstarts: Someone will reveal that the emperors have no clothes.

In truth, though, the risk is vastly greater when two candidates go head-to-head. In New York, in fact, major-party candidates employ what The New York Times calls the "crowded debate" strategy to prevent just that exposure. Gov. George Pataki wants to face his principal challenger, Carl McCall, oh yes, but he'll only do it if all the lesser-knowns are also in the mix.

"The governor gets points for inclusion," writes The Times, "but we can't help feeling his real objective is to stuff so many people on the stage that he and Mr. McCall will just fade into the sea of faces."

"New York voters deserve more than that," The Times continues. "The public should get a chance to see them both put on the spot, permitted to take their best shots and put on their best defense."

Here the motivations of media and candidates are in conflict. The candidates are best served when things are low-key and civil. The media, and the voters faced with making choices, are best served by the most intense and engaged debate.

Believe me, for any red-blooded American journalist, controversy trumps conspiracy any day. The media have no investment in keeping power concentrated in two parties. Indeed, some of the best news stories of the past century center in people who broke away from the "Republocrat" fold: Teddy Roosevelt (in his Bull Moose incarnation), Robert LaFollette, Henry Wallace, George Wallace, John Anderson, Ross Perot and, most recently, Nader.

How many of those men, do you suppose, spent much time worrying about media neglect? Each brought a galvanizing idea to the public. The public responded. And, with the public, came the media.

Are today's mass media, then, innocent of undercovering candidates who can enrich and enliven our political scene? Nope, we're guilty as charged.

But the reason isn't dark conspiracy, it's a mundane shortage of resources. Space, time and news staffs are finite. As candidates proliferate, coverage can become correspondingly shallow.

That's a reason, though, not an excuse. Maybe the trick is to find candidates who do stand out, ideas that do have the power to galvanize, and then focus full-bore on them. Yes, Mr. Good, that takes discrimination, but in the best sense of the word. It leaves no room for treating everyone equally just because it makes us all feel good.

Sue O'Brien (sobrien@denverpost.com) is editor of the Denver Post editorial page.