[Susan notes: Ralph Nader hits the nail on the head. I've demonstrated with my research on press coverage on Race to the Top and the Common Core standards (published in Extra!, as well as being censored by The Times, the media just leaves us out. And it's not just big papers like The Times. I can't get anything into NCTE's online newsletter or the Vermont NEA paper.]

Published in New York Times
01/03/2011

To the editor

"The Repeal Amendment" ( editorial, Dec. 27) asserts that many Americans who are economically struggling "have no progressive champion," and that the left has "ceded the field to the Tea Party and, in doing so, allowed it to make history."



Hello! There are plenty of distinguished progressive champions lobbying, rallying, exposing, suing and organizing at the national, state and local level. Yet they have been mostly left out of the mass media, on television and radio and in the news, feature, style, opinion and book review pages of major newspapers, including The Times.



Meanwhile, the Tea Partiers have seen their modest initiatives hugely magnified and therefore expanded by major media. This has mainstreamed the radical right, including Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter and Pamela Geller, as well as the most extreme neoconservatives who still receive media attention despite their deceptive, disastrous Iraq war-mongering.



Check your own pages and you will see the evidence. Or better yet, have your public editor look into why flagrant, often bigoted right-wingers are given so much time and space compared with fact-based progressive leaders committed to the "equality and welfare" that your editorial espouses.



After all, mass media coverage matters greatly for social and political movements.

— Ralph Nader