ABC News Good to the Last Drop in its Dissing of Ron Paul

Several people emailed me about this - but Jason Gordon was the first, early yesterday, and he gets the credit. (Two other early correspondents were Matt Caverhill, and Lee on MySpace.) The world at large - all of you, via your Internet connections - are the eyes and ears and witnesses of the mass media doing right and wrong. Our democracy depends upon you.

This is not the worst thing that ABC has done to Ron Paul, his supporters, and thereby our democratic process - no closing down online boards in the middle of discussions, no leaving Ron Paul out of post-debate analyses, as ABC did earlier this year - but it's bad enough to warrant taking permanent note.

As Matt Simon writes about in detail in the Huffington Post, ABC shunted John Stossel's interview with Ron Paul, intended for television broadcast, to its Internet site.

Now, there's nothing wrong with the Internet, and ABC is of course entitled to decide where and how to publish its interviews ... but, who is ABC kidding here? Clearly someone decided to deprive the American people of the maximum exposure that broadcast as well as Internet posting would have given this interview.

What could have driven ABC to do this? Clearly, John Stossel is a major, well-respected broadcast journalist, and Ron Paul is certainly a candidate who has raised millions of real American dollars.

Perhaps Ron Paul's low standing in the general polls was the reason. But surely ABC is aware that Mike Huckabee, once not that much higher in the polls than Ron Paul, is now in first place in the Iowa and South Carolina polls. Is ABC so sure that can't happen again? Do we want the American Broadcast Company making such kinds of decisions for the American people?

This part of our election process is soon coming to end. Beginning with the Iowa caucus in January, America will be moving from candidates debating to candidates being voted up or down.

When the history of this 2007-2008 election process is written, ABC will have a special place of dishonor. I will certainly include a section on its misreporting and anti-democratic behavior in the next book I'll be writing - entitled New, New Media.

One can only hope that ABC will improve as we move into the next phase of this process. But I'm not holding my breath that ABC will be standing up for democracy any time soon.