It's not just Obama and Clinton

Here's a bit of education for the US news media: Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are not the only candidates for the Democratic nomination for president. As a public service, I thought I'd point that out because apparently the US news media don't know it.

I found the above video at The Horse's Mouth which has been pointing out how the media has been ignoring the campaign of John Edwards. The video pokes fun at the media for this.

Greg Sargent noted on The Horse's Mouth that there are some legitimate reasons for focusing coverage on Obama and Clinton; that they both have historic candidacies and that modern newsrooms have extremely limited resources are just two of those possibly legitimate reasons. But as the blog also says, “I'm not at all arguing that the media is solely to blame for the Edwards camp's problems. Just saying again that we should all admit that in a broad sense Edwards got screwed here, because, well, that's exactly what happened.”

If the news media started focusing on issues and not personalities, on facts and not hype, they just might give Edwards the coverage he deserves. Instead, their obsession with Clinton and Obama means that Edwards has received less press coverage than Huckabee, and Democratic voters are deprived of hearing about all the choices available to them.

With the American news media doing such a bad job of covering the campaign at this stage, what hope is there that they'll be any better when covering the general election? And isn't that in itself a threat to democracy?