Manufacturing Consent: Exhibit n
| From the Kucinich campaign website.... I added the links. You can watch the debate here. Note that Gravel, who, despite his good offices re: the Pentagon Papers, is making a buffoon of himself (and thus of any truly liberal opposition to the other candidates), is allowed a lot of time to be laughed at and generally make an ass of himself. Clearly, Kucinich is too serious a threat. Meanwhile, ABC is making sure that the American people don't get to make their own choice about Kucinich. That's called "democracy." Kucinich campaign is awaiting ABC News explanations for its actions | | |
The Kucinich campaign is still awaiting an official response from ABC News about the unexplained -- some have charged "inexplicable" -- way in which the network has handled its post-debate online coverage of Ohio Congressman and Democratic Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich over the past few days.
Among the "outrages" that have energized tens of thousands of Kucinich supporters -- and even non-supporters -- thousands of whom have flooded the ABC News website and other online news sites with comments of protest:
- Congressman Kucinich was apparently deliberately cropped out of a "Politics Page" [since removed; Kucinich is shown in a different shot now. Not worthy of a close-up, though.] 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. [It's back up; linked above; Kucinich is winning again.]
- 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.
The campaign submitted objections and inquiries to ABC News representatives
Stayed tuned for further details.