In summary, about a third or more of the public has little or no confidence in any of the major institutions which make up U.S. society.
U.S. government is run by Democrats and Republicans. Only a minority of the public has much confidence in government institutions, while a much greater number have little or no confidence in government. This strongly implies massive public dissatisfaction with the leadership of Democrats and Republicans. This is confirmed by a Rasmussen poll released May 8, 2007, which found, "that 58% of American adults say it would be good for the United States to have a truly competitive third political party," as reported by Ballot Access News.
The large mass of people disaffected from major U.S. institutions as well as Democrats and Republicans is the base from which support for McKinney, Nader, and Barr, and other alternative candidates, is drawn from.
The mainstream media pays no attention to any of this, and, in fact, the results of Gallup's annual poll of public confidence received scarce mainstream coverage. Nor does mainstream media investigate the alarming lack of public confidence in leading U.S. institutions, which, if confirmed, is one of the biggest political stories of our time. Mainstream media's near total preoccupation with coverage of only Obama and McCain flies in the face of public opinion. This is likely a big reason why the Gallup poll found confidence in TV news and newspapers to be so low.
A number of questions emerge from the polling data. Why won't mainstream media provide coverage of McKinney, Nader, and Barr which is at least commensurate with public support for these candidates? Would support for these candidates grow if mainstream news coverage of them increased? Would inclusion of the issues raised by these candidates change the public debate around the election? Finally, why won't mainstream media investigate the loss of public confidence in major U.S. institutions?
comment added after end of comment deadline:
Jonathan,
I don't know how easy it is to edit text after it is posted on OpEdNews, but your calculation of the percent of coverage received by third party presidential candidates is wrong, and you need to correct it. If you can't change the text you submitted after the fact, you need to post a comment yourself correcting it very soon, preferably before someone else notices the mistakes and posts comments saying that you're wrong.
51 of 2,110 is .024 (which rounds to .02) or 2.4% (which rounds to 2%), not .02%. Thus the CNN coverage would only need to be increased fivefold to be roughly equal to their support in polls. I don't know whether you made the same mistake of confusing proportion and percentage for the other media institutions' coverage where you didn't give the raw numbers
on which they were based, but I suspect you did because .01 percent of hits would be one hit out of 10,000, and I doubt that there are enough stories on the leading presidential candidates on the for such small percentages to show up at all. (If the New York Times had just one story each in the last year that mentioned Barr, McKinney or Nader enough to produce a hit, they'd had to have averaged 27 to 28 stories a day on Obama or McCain during that year for the percentage of hits to be the
.03 that you give.)
/Dave Kadlecek
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