Dear
Editor,
It's time to call mainstream broadcast news, newspapers and weekly journals who remain silent on the exclusion of third party candidates from the presidential debates to account.
Why is it
that public radio stations and non-profit organizations have to carry the
burden of exclusionary politics on their fragile, under-funded shoulders?
Events like “Expand the Debate” with Amy Goodman of "Democracy Now!" and
the live streaming “Fair and Equal Debate” with Larry King are scrambling to represent the voice of marginalized third party candidates - who, in turn, are trying to appeal to marginalized independent voters looking for a viable option to corporate-funded (and therefore,
corporate-owned) politics - but it is off-stage politics, which means democracy has been relegated to the back of the bus.
I am just a lowly
cyberpoet, but I find it odd in the extreme that in this time of increasing climate change,
unprecedented Wall Street fraud and the evident de-criminalization of white collar crimes, as well as the thousands of displaced families thrown out of their homes by bankters who tricked them into predatory loans and then foreclosed on their property - that more voters aren't looking for an alternative to the current two party system.
It is beyond amazing to me that after all these misdeeds, which left massive sections of our citizenry vulnerable and unrepresented by two dysfunctional parties ("left" masquerading as progressive "liberalism" when it resembles Reaganism more than Roosevelt, and the new right-of-right "conservatism" with a fervor and zeal deliberately designed to provide the illusion of disagreement), that citizens aren't clamoring for massive reform...let alone going numbly along with whatever corporations throw at them.
It is in these moments of sheer amazement and disappointment that I have to remind myself that people don’t have an opportunity
to consider their voting options if those options remain unrepresented in the
social/political conversation.
And that is, I believe, where mainstream media has dropped
the ball.
There are more than
two choices - there are alternatives to corporate money determining public
policy. But the voters will never know it because the individuals and
institutions whose life’s work it is to inform and illuminate have been
silenced.
Silence from self-censorship for fear of losing well-paying
positions is just as deafening as silence from violent oppression.
Because you have been
silenced…Democracy has been silenced.
Now all that is left of local, network, cable and world news is carefully engineered distraction through Public Relations, business and investment-centric misinformation and scandal-driven drivel.
End the corporate
lock-down on Democracy. Speak up for the people you seek to inform. Cover the
full spectrum of the social and political choices at our disposal.
Why? Because information is our best tool for bringing
about social change. Because being allowed the option of hearing those voices calling out from the wilderness may be our only chance to pierce the fog of self-serving political rhetoric.
And because it's not only your job...it's your calling.
At least that's the way it seems to me,
