A Case Study in Media Bias against Advocates of Third Party and Independent Alternatives to Democratic-Republican Party Government

Two recent opinion features, one each from the New York Times and Washington Post, succinctly demonstrate the mainstream media's co-dependent relationship with the Democratic-Republican Party and ruling political class. On the heels of Charlie Crist's announcement that he would run for US Senate in Florida as an independent, each paper queried six figures for their input on relatively similar questions: the Washington Post asked "Does America need another party?" while the NYT asked "When is it smart to abandon your party?" However, the possibility of an open and engaging discussion of this issue was closed off from the very start by each paper's choice of respondents. The Washington Post published the responses of:

• MARTIN FROST Chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee from 1995 to 1998; representative from Texas from 1979 to 2005
• NEWT GINGRICH Republican speaker of the House from 1995 to 1999
• JOHN ANDERSON Republican representative from Illinois from 1961 to 1981; member of the board of FairVote
• DAN SCHNUR Director of the University of Southern California's Unruh Institute of Politics; communications director for John McCain's 2000 presidential campaign
• MARK PENN Chief executive of Burson-Marsteller; adviser to Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign; pollster and adviser to Bill Clinton from 1995 through 2000
• KEITH APPELL Republican strategist, former national spokesman for Steve Forbes' presidential campaign and senior vice president of CRC Public Relations

With the exception of the aged Republican-turned-independent John Anderson, the Post did not see fit to include the opinions of anyone other than prominent Democratic and Republican political activists and operatives. Needless to say, their responses to the question were neither positive nor affirmative. The New York Times, for its part, queried only establishmentarian academics, any number of whom likely double as political operatives and advisers for the ruling parties – the first gentleman on this list, for instance, is a former head of the research department for the Republican National Committee:

• John J. Pitney Jr. is the Roy P. Crocker professor of American politics at Claremont McKenna College.
• Susan Sullivan Lagon is a senior fellow at the Government Affairs Institute at Georgetown University
• Marjorie Randon Hershey is a professor of political science and director of the Leadership, Ethics, and Social Action program at Indiana University.
• Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University.
• Norman J. Ornstein is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
• David C. King is a lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he is also faculty chair of Harvard’s Executive Program for Newly Elected Members of the U.S. Congress.

Unsurprisingly, the great majority of these twelve respondents did nothing but regurgitate the slogans and talking points that pass for "common wisdom" among the Democratic-Republican political class. Perhaps one day it will occur to the drones in the corporate media that they might ask actual independent advocates and third party activists for their take on the necessity of political alternatives to the reproduction of the Democratic-Republican two-party state and duopoly system of government.