Kucinich v The Mouse

[Doug]

Following last Sunday's Democratic presidential debate on ABC News' This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Dennis Kucinich's campaign asked ABC News to address issues it had with treatment Rep. Kucinich (D-Ohio) received both during the debate and afterward in ABC's online coverage.

...Time magazine's National Political Correspondent Karen Tumulty queried them. Writing on the Time blog Swampland, Tumulty initially says of the Kucinich team's issues with ABC's treatment (which included Kucinich not having a chance to speak until 28 minutes into the debate), "These all seemed like fair complaints to me, so I asked ABC News to respond." Then Tumulty says, "In an e-mail, Executive Director Andrea Jones answered him [Kucinich] point by point."

...here are the issues (an aggregate of the thousands of complaints received during and after ABC's debate coverage) that the Kucinich campaign asked ABC News to address:

* Congressman Kucinich was apparently deliberately cropped out of a "Politics Page" photo of the candidates.

* Sometime Monday afternoon, after Congressman Kucinich took a commanding lead in ABC's own on-line "Who won the Democratic debate" survey, the survey was dropped from prominence on the website.

* ABC News has not officially reported the results of its online survey.

* After the results of that survey showed Congressman Kucinich winning handily, ABC News, sometime Monday afternoon, replaced the original survey with a second survey asking "Who is winning the Democratic debate?"


* During the early voting Monday afternoon and evening, U.S. Senator Barack Obama was in the lead. By sometime late Monday or early Tuesday morning, Congressman Kucinich regained the lead by a wide margin in this second survey.

* Sometime Tuesday morning, ABC News apparently dropped the second survey from prominence or killed it entirely.

* AND, as every viewer of the nationally televised Sunday Presidential forum is aware, Congressman Kucinich was not given an opportunity to answer a question from moderator George Stephanopoulos until 28 minutes into the program.

Now back to Tumulty commenting on Jones' response [emphasis below is mine]:

This gist of her answer is this: She denies that Kucinich was cropped out of any photo, noting that "there are 20 photos live on the ABC News website, Mr. Kucinich is in a number of them and there is even one of him and his wife. He is one of 6 candidates who got his own photo in the slide show. As for the images, clearly nothing was cropped, the image in question was shot by Charlie Neibergall of the AP not ABC."

FALSE. Had Tumulty - Time magazine's National Political Correspondent and former member of the White House press corps - simply located the original AP photo (which, at most, should've taken a few minutes online), she would've found Kucinich in it and realized the following version ABC News prominently displayed online after the debate had, indeed, been cropped.

Read the rest here.

DOUG
At the link, see the cropped photo and a link to the original. Someone cut out Kucinich.

[Tony]

As a 'radical' lefty, the only democrat I could vote for without holding my nose would be Kucinich. In any other western democracy, his brand of leftism would not be extreme. Here, unfortunately, he has no chance.

I can't believe that anyone in the media can seriously argue that they are being fair in their treatment of the major and minor Party candidates, either Democratic or Republican. Where the money goes, the media goes, then the poll numbers follow. Its a sorry excuse for a democracy.

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

Actually the media created this whole business - not just who's "top tier" but the fact we're running the 2008 campaign in 2007. None of the candidates, of whatever "tier" wanted to start this early. The earlier the start the more money is needed. The more money needed, the more candidates can be forced to go to the corporate owners of the media to get it. Especially since the corporate-owned media will only present their own candidates "fairly" as news - everybody else has to buy their time for issues, rebuttal, and damage control. Sometimes they can't even buy it. I can't tell you the number of times I heard, "Kerry should have said..." during and after the 2004 election (even to this day). I read his speeches. Kerry DID say... - but the news didn't show it and the networks didn't run his damage-control ads. Maybe if the internet gets stronger, but as long as 80% of Americans get their "information" from the MSM, Kucinich will never have a chance. (And John Edwards is iffy.)