http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=comment/reply/30251

And today a judge ruled that Kucinich must be allowed to debate, or the Judge threatened to issue an injunction halting the debates. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20080114/kucinich-debate/

Rep. Dennis Kucinich won’t be taking part in MSNBC’s debate in Las Vegas on Tuesday. It certainly won’t be the first time that Kucinich was excluded from a recent Democratic debate. But the difference is Kucinich was initially invited, and had met the criteria, for the MSNBC debate. Then, MSNBC changed the criteria and told Kucinich he was uninvited.

Here’s the full post.  No, Kucinich doesn’t have a substantial amount of support in polls, but he is a member of Congress.  Kucinich is also a vocal critic of big media.

Check out the rationale: 

“The original criteria for the debate called for the inclusion of the top four democratic candidates in national polling. With Bill Richardson dropping out of the race last week, that moved Kucinich to fourth place in polls. NBC decided to change the criteria, featuring the top three Dem. candidates: Sen. Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Sen. Barack Obama.”

Why is it so important to have these statistically minority voices heard?  The problem was demonstrated by psychologist Soloman Asch. See here. 

Indeed, they do. Unfortunately for Edwards, Obama was a much better outsider/underdog-wins story, so he got the coverage. Edwards, relative to the two others, was a much less interesting story.

Don’t be a facist corporatist apologist and demean the demeaning of Edwards as a candidate. If you look at what Edwards has done his whole life, he is the antithesis of the facist corporatists which only want voters to be educated enough to be greeters at Wal*Mart and take their daily reaming with a smile on their faces as they swill down their local product.

Edwards has “beaten them, beaten them and beaten them, again!” If you can’t control the man, you can control how he’s covered in the media! Just look, the major news magazines (Time and Newsweek)recently had both Hilary and Obama on their covers and ignored Edwards.

Of course Edwards doesn’t get the coverage of Obama and Clinton, they take their money from the same “right” people. Edwards doesn’t take PAC money and as a result isn’t tied to the facist corporate media’s masters who call the shots in the age of W, Cheney and their ilk.

(Yes, I support John Edwards for President!)

This is an invalid conclusion to draw from the data. The statistics provided merely compare the *relative* coverage among Obama, Clinton and Edwards; they do not give any absolute numbers, so we cannot know whether the media is, in fact, paying more or less attention to Edwards. All we know is that his share has dropped relative to two of the other candidates. Furthermore, from the commentary, one might conclude that coverage of Edwards had dropped off the map, when in fact it only dropped a few percentage points.

There is perfectly obvious explanation for the data: attention grew for Obama because he won and it grew for Clinton because she lost, while Edwards neither greatly exceeded nor greatly disappointed expectations.

After Iowa, there was every reason for the corporate media to have started including John Edwards in its narrative. After all, even though Edwards had been third place since the summer, trailing Hillary by double-digits in several polls, he erased that gap completely, and he did so on a relative shoestring budget. As BruinKid has shown, Hillary and Obama each spent twice as much per vote as Edwards.

But instead of paying more intention to Edwards, since Iowa the corporate media is paying less attention. The corporate media blackout of John Edwards continues, and it’s getting worse.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/1/5/12286/27650/142/431084