The usual criticisms of the Iowa caucuses--that the votes of a small, demographically unrepresentative slice of America gobble up too much airtime--are basically correct.

As David Sirota noted in Salon (1/3/12):

The same journalism industry that pleads poverty to justify cutting big city newspapers' editorial staffs, gutting coverage of state legislatures and city councils, and eliminating every other critical topic not related to Washington's red-versus-blue fetish from news content--as writer Joe Romero recounts, this same industry has for months devoted a massive army to cover Iowa's small contest.

Just one example of the absurdity:  At least one of Rick Santorum's final campaign stops was so mobbed by reporters that some of actual residents of Iowa he was supposed to be talking to couldn't squeeze into the meetings, as noted by the Washington Post:

The evidence of Santorum's recent surge was obvious: The overwhelming crush of media members at the Polk City stop included reporters from Italy and Australia. Dozens of voters--who two weeks ago probably could have had the candidate to themselves--were pressed out of the restaurant and stood in the cold.

"I'm actually from Polk City," one said to another as he was unable to squeeze his way inside. "Yeah, we don't count," the other responded.

Of the storylines that have emerged so far, one is that Mitt Romney has yet to dominate the competition. This has been present in the campaign coverage for months, and continued in the papers this morning.  Susan Page in USA Today wrote:

By favoring a conservative, a moderate and a libertarian in nearly equal doses, visitors to the state's 1,774 precincts did little to clear up what has been a topsy-turvy contest to choose President Obama's opponent next fall.

In the New York Times, Jeff Zeleny writes that "Mitt Romney's quest to swiftly lock down the Republican presidential nomination with a commanding finish in the Iowa caucuses was undercut on Tuesday night by the surging candidacy of Rick Santorum." And Zeleny added later,  "The Iowa caucuses did not deliver a clean answer to what type of candidate Republicans intend to rally behind to try to defeat President Obama and win back the White House."

Also in the Times, courtesy of Jim Rutenberg:

But more than anything else, the Iowa caucuses cast in electoral stone what has played out in the squishy world of polls and punditry for the last 12 months: The deep ideological divisions among Republicans continue to complicate their ability to focus wholly on defeating President Obama, and to impede Mr. Romney's efforts to overcome the internal strains and win the consent if not the heart of the party.

There is no reason in the world that voters in any state in the country should line up behind any single candidate. The fact that the voters in a particular party are split between different candidates who represent different factions of their party is a sign that people have different views about who they think should lead the country. Which is, after all, a good thing.

The alternative would be to deprive voters everywhere else a chance to have a say about who their party's nominee will be. There's a curious sort of tension at work. On the one hand, you get a sense that reporters want the primary season to continue for months, if only for the sake of giving them something to cover. On the other hand, they spend an awful lot of time puzzling over why Mitt Romney can't manage to wrap up the Republican nomination after one state has voted.

Washington Post reporter Nia-Malika Henderson reports today (1/3/12)that Republican candidate Ron Paul really says some weird things out on the campaign trail. His appearances start out normal...

And then, for the next 45 minutes or so, he outlines a view of the world so bleak it would make Chicken Little sound like an optimist.

Now, to be fair, some of what he says is more than a little troubling. Massive federal budget cuts could cause some people to suffer, he explains, but "they should have to suffer."

The piece closes on this note:

There is one radical change Paul likes: the Internet.

"Fortunately we're able to get some information out, and a lot of what we've done in our campaign makes use of the Internet," Paul said at a rally in Des Moines.

As might be expected, however, Paul anticipates a problem or two on that front as well.

"But also," he went on to say, "there's an attack on the Internet now."

The article ends there, as if this idea is self-evidently absurd.  I mean, really, what on Earth is this guy talking about....

"Ron Paul Ignored by the Media? Not So Much" was the headline on a National Journal post yesterday (12/21/11). "The Texan's campaign has raised millions of dollars to combat the alleged media conspiracy that, they claim, is out to destroy the candidate the media fears most," the Journal's Sarah Mimms reported. "There is just one problem: The Ron Paul revolution is being televised."

By Mimms' count, "since announcing his campaign on May 13, Paul has made 87 appearances on cable television and Sunday news programs. That's more than any other candidate currently running for president." She stresses that "he has appeared on Fox News 63 times since June 1, more than any of his primary rivals."

It's true that Fox News is an important outlet for GOP candidates. If Paul's been on Fox 63 times, though, that means he's been on other TV outlets at most 24 times; how that compares with other GOP candidates, Mimms doesn't say. (Note: Of course, this doesn't include Paul's CNN appearance yesterday, when he walked off an interview with Gloria Borger about the racist newsletters he was publishing in the 1980s and 1990s.) She does acknowledge later down that on broader measures of media exposure, Paul is doing very poorly:

Paul is mentioned on air far less frequently than most of his rivals, including Bachmann and Texas Gov. Rick Perry, both of whom trail him in national and state-level polls. And when pundits talk about him, they frequently do so in a far more negative tone.

It is also true, as his campaign has asserted, that Paul gets less time to air his views in debates.

Here's a graph from Pew's Project for Excellence in Journalism (10/21/11) that gives a more informative impression of the relative attention paid to the various leading GOP candidates:

A more accurate headline for the National Journal piece? "Ron Paul Ignored by the Media? Pretty Much."

The Monday broadcast of CBS Evening News (12/19/11) began with big news, with anchor Scott Pelley announcing:

The secretary of Defense says tonight that the United States will not allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon. In an interview with CBS News, Leon Panetta says that despite efforts to disrupt their nuclear program, the Iranians have reached a point where they can assemble a bomb in a year or potentially less.

To ratchet up the drama, Pelley told viewers that Panetta was aboard  "the jet nicknamed the Doomsday Plane. This is the command post where he and the president would direct a nuclear war."

Pelley reiterated that, according to Panetta, "Iran needs only one year to build a nuclear weapon." Then came this exchange:

PELLEY: So are you saying that Iran could have a nuclear weapon in 2012?

PANETTA: It would be sometime around a year that they would be able to do it. Perhaps a little less. The one proviso, Scott, is if they have a hidden facility somewhere in Iran that may be enriching fuel.

PELLEY: So that they could develop a weapon even more quickly than we believed?

PANETTA: That's correct.

Near the end of the segment, Pelley made this remark:

Panetta told us that while the Iranians need a year or less to assemble the weapon, he has no indication yet that they have made the decision to go ahead.

So Iran could have a weapon in a year--or maybe not at all.

In today's New York Times, we see a story headlined, "Aides Qualify Panetta’s Comments on Iran," which leads with this:

An assertion by Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta that Iran could have a nuclear weapon as soon as next year was based on a highly aggressive timeline and a series of actions that Iran has not yet taken, senior Pentagon officials said Tuesday.

The report added these comments from a Pentagon spokesperson (bolded for emphasis):

"The secretary was clear that we have no indication that the Iranians have made a decision to develop a nuclear weapon," Mr. Little said. "He was asked to comment on prospective and aggressive timelines on Iran’s possible production of nuclear weapons--and he said if, and only if, they made such a decision. He didn't say that Iran would, in fact, have a nuclear weapon in 2012."

Now without knowing what was actually said in the full interview, it's hard to know whether Panetta's office is trying to walk back his careless, inaccurate rhetoric, or whether the CBS interviewer was pushing a hard line on Iran and nuclear weapons, treating the allegations being made about that country's nuclear program as if they were facts.

If it's the latter, it wouldn't be unprecedented. At the December 15 Republican debate, Fox host Bret Baier posed this question to Ron Paul:

Congressman Paul, many Middle East experts now say Iran may be less than one year away from getting a nuclear weapon. Now, judging from your past statements, even if you had solid intelligence that Iran, in fact, was going to get a nuclear weapon, President Paul would remove the U.S. sanctions on Iran, included those added by the Obama administration. So, to be clear, GOP nominee Paul would be running left of President Obama on the issue of Iran?

Paul tried to explain to Baier that there is not, in fact, any intelligence suggesting Iran is less than a year from having the bomb. As Paul explained:

For you to say that there is some scientific evidence and some people arguing that maybe in a year they might have a weapon, there's a lot more saying they don't have it. There's no UN evidence of that happening. Clapper at the--in our national security department, he says there is no evidence. It's no different than it was in 2003. You know what I really fear about what's happening here? It's another Iraq coming. There's war propaganda going on.

Baier, for his part, followed up by demanding that the candidate answer a question based on a false premise:

Congressman Paul, the question was based on the premise that you had solid intelligence, you actually had solid intelligence as President Paul, and yet you still at that point would pull back U.S. sanctions, and again, as a GOP nominee, would be running left of President Obama on this issue?

It's probably not that these journalists want Iran to have a nuclear weapon. But they do seem to want to have a public debate that assumes Iran is about to have a nuclear weapon. Given the possible repercussions, that's bad enough.

The Washington Post's series of candidate profiles continues. Today it's Ron Paul's turn.

In Joel Achenbach's main piece (12/15/11), readers learn, in the lead paragraph, that Paul is

not the standard presidential candidate--he lacks the factory-built appearance of Mitt Romney or Rick Perry. He's thin, bony, a bantam rooster.

Thankfully, the rest of the piece is focused more on substance. But a second article is peculiarly focused on Paul's looks and the sound of his voice--suggesting that this explains why he doesn't get much "attention" (which, when reporters say it, should be taken to mean "media attention," since Paul obviously is attracting the interest of actual voters).

Sarah Kaufman writes (12/15/11):

So why, with his long-held views and an enthusiastic base of support, does Paul get so little attention? It's not only his anti-establishment message. Part of his acceptance issue is the way he presents himself. As much as he is a refreshing departure from the mold, he also comes across as a gadfly.

Consider if Paul had the heftier, more serious bearing of a Romney or a Gingrich. Would he be so easy to dismiss? In the Darwinian world of public perception, it's easy to discount what you hear from someone who looks a little smaller, and perhaps a little weaker. Especially when his voice tends to spiral into the upper registers.

Yep, if only he could look like Newt Gingrich--with his "more serious bearing"--then the media would take him seriously. It's hard to criticize the media when they explain their deficiencies on their own.

Washington Post ombud Patrick Pexton dedicated his column this weekend (8/29/11) to addressing complaints about the skimpy coverage of Republican presidential contender Ron Paul. It's hard to argue with the numbers he's gathered:

Still, the Post’s coverage of Paul looks thin compared with its stories on Bachmann. In the past six months, the Post has published online or in print 34 staff-written stories plus 12 wire service stories on Bachmann, who has served not even five years in the House, and that doesn't count the blog posts about her on the Fix or Glenn Kessler's Fact Checker pieces. The Post published 19 staff-written stories on former House speaker Newt Gingrich in that time, plus one wire story and many blog posts. On Paul, a congressman for more than 20 years, who was No. 2 in fundraising after Romney in the last report, the Post has published just three full stories, a couple more that had large sections on him along with other candidates, two wire stories and the Fix blog posts.

Bachmann has a 46-5 advantage over Paul--that's pretty stunning (and it doesn't even count Bachmann's appearances in the Fact Checker column, which is a place you're likely to read about her). A Post editor assures that more coverage of Paul is forthcoming, and that Gingrich got more coverage because his "campaign imploded when most of his senior staff walked out in June." You don't normally hear journalists talking about the need to thoroughly cover campaigns that are in complete disarray.

There is little reason to care about what the polls say right now about who's leading in the Republican presidential nomination. But the media obviously think otherwise, hence this headline in the Washington Post yesterday (8/25/11):

Romney Loses GOP Front-Runner Status

The "news" is that Rick Perry is leading in a new Gallup Poll. But read a little further:

The survey showed Rep. Ron Paul (Tex.) at 13 percent and Rep. Michele Bachmann (Minn.) slipping to 10 percent. No other candidate registered in the double digits.

So this means Paul's in the "top tier" now, right?

This is a good time to issue a quick reminder about the hazards of paying too much attention to early polling:

In 2003, early polling of the following year's Democratic nominees (e.g., CBS News poll, 12/14-12/16/03) showed eventual nominee John Kerry in the middle of the pack, trailing Howard Dean, Wesley Clark, Richard Gephardt and Joe Lieberman. An August 2003 USA Today/Gallup poll (8/25-8/26/03) showed front-runner Lieberman with a 10-point lead over Gephardt. As the dynamics of the nomination race shifted, so did the polls--but not in a way that would suggest the polling would predict the winner. By January 2004, Howard Dean was leading the pack, followed closely by Wesley Clark (1/2-5/04).

On the Republican side:

in the 2000 race, Bush's only serious competition came from Sen. John McCain, who was trailing far behind in the early polls--behind Elizabeth Dole, Dan Quayle and Steve Forbes (e.g., NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, 1/99).

One of the strangest comments post- Iowa straw poll came from reporter Kelly O'Donnell on NBC Nightly News (8/14/11):

Both Pawlenty's exit and Perry's launch consumed political oxygen that typically would have gone to the straw poll's actual winner, Congresswoman Bachmann, who appeared on all five Sunday morning talk shows, including Meet the Press.

I'm having trouble imagining how someone could put those two thoughts together. Bachmann was merely on five national TV shows Sunday morning. That's being overshadowed?

If that's oxygen deprivation, one has to wonder what you'd call the media treatment of Ron Paul, who finished one percentage point behind Bachmann, despite being treated as a non-candidate by the national media. Politico's Roger Simon  (8/15/11), argued that you can't say the straw poll means almost nothing and that Bachmann's victory makes her a top-tier candidate:

Straw polls are just organized bribery, with the campaigns buying the tickets and distributing them to supporters. (And, in fact, this is what I wrote before Ames.)

What they really show, many argue, is not where the philosophical heart of the party is, but the organizational abilities of the candidates.

Fine, I'll buy that. But why didn’t Paul get the same credit for his organizational abilities as Bachmann did for hers?

He points out that last time around finishing second was treated as a victory:

Four years ago, Mike Huckabee came in a bad second to Romney, losing by 13.4 percentage points. Huckabee managed to spin that into a victory at Ames and became a media darling.

But Paul almost wins the thing and he remains poison.

Simon's conclusion, though, is disappointing.  GOP operatives and officials were responsible for determining the winners/losers storyline:

So don’t blame the media. Here are Republicans, presumably Republican operatives, who said if one candidate wins, the contest is significant, but if another wins the contest is not credible.

That doesn't add up. Reporters don't have to take their marching orders from party operatives.

But if you want the definitive take-down of the corporate media's Paul-blocking top-tierism watch this segment from the Daily Show:

As we've said plenty of times before,  one of the main jobs of campaign journalists is winnowing the field of candidates-- which must come as a relief to voters who don't want to have more of a say in the process.

Before the results of the Iowa straw poll rolled in this weekend, there were pieces about whether anyone should pay attention to the event in the first place.  Most reporters are willing to admit that paying so much attention to an elaborate popularity contest where the candidates pay voters to participate is a little odd.

The lesson for readers comes afterwards, though--when reporters nevertheless assign meaning to the event.

The main takeaway from this weekend seems to be that we now have a "top tier" of Republican candidates. "GOP now has 'three-person race' after  poll," says USA Today. "Top tier puts GOP contest in focus," says a Washington Post headline.

So the "top tier"-- i.e., the candidates we're supposed to actually pay attention t0-- consists of the straw poll winner-- who most observers believe has almost no chance of actually winning the nomination-- plus two candidates who didn't participate in the contest-- one of whom has been a candidate for all of one weekend.

And, naturally, the person who nearly won the straw poll is a "nuisance," according to NBC's Chuck Todd (Meet the Press, 8/14/11):

Well, it was a shake-up, and we have a top tier. It is Mitt Romney, Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann. There are a couple of other candidates that can make some waves. Ron Paul proved that he can do that, he's going to be a nuisance to the field.

Of course, even if Ron Paul had won the straw poll instead of finishing a close second, it's rather unlikely he'd be in media's "top tier."

Does narrowing the field down at this point help any voters assess the candidates? Does it clear up questions about what the candidates are saying about the issues? Of course not. But it gives campaign reporters a horse race with fewer horses. Which is apparently what they want.

In the New York Times corrections box (6/7/11):

An article on Monday about Rick Santorum, a former senator from Pennsylvania who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination, omitted the name of one of the other declared candidates, who number six, not five. Ron Paul, a Republican congressman from Texas, is also running.

One of the main tasks the  media perform in a campaign is excluding the candidates they deem unworthy of consideration. The Times is off to an early start.

The New York Times's Michael Shear (4/27/11) has this odd reference to Ron Paul's presidential campaign:

Surveys suggest that Mr. Paul’s support remains low. In most recent polls, Mr. Paul receives just over 5 percent of the support from potential Republican voters. That is similar to the level of support he received in contests four years ago, when he served mostly as a foil for discussion during the debates.

It's not clear what Shear's criteria for "low" polling is--according to Real Clear Politics, Paul averages 6 percent in recent polls, within three or four points of Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich, who get considerably more media attention. Paul in turn is doing 3 or 4 points better than candidates like Tim Pawlenty and Mitch Daniels, who are certainly treated as serious prospects in media discussions.

And I'm not sure what a "foil for discussion" is,  but I'm guessing they're referring to the debate where Ron Paul said something completely uncontroversial at a debate, and Giuliani scored a "home run" by misrepresenting his point--to the delight of the media.

From a FAIR Media Advisory (5/31/07):

But the second Republican debate (5/15/07) flipped this media script, when Republican candidate Ron Paul dared to raise a taboo subject: Al-Qaeda's statements about the September 11 attacks. "They attack us because we've been over there, we've been bombing Iraq for 10 years," Paul said. "We've been in the Middle East.... Have you ever read about the reasons they attacked us?"

GOP front-runner Rudy Giuliani responded by saying he'd never heard such an "absurd explanation" for the September 11 attacks, "that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq"—a response that got sustained applause from the audience, and much the same from the press corps.

Appearing on MSNBC's Hardball (5/16/07), Washington Post editorial board member Jonathan Capehart called it "a big moment, a home run for Rudy.... I knew that what Rudy was saying was heartfelt, and he meant it, because, when you look at his eyes, you have never seen him more serious, more focused." Capehart added that Giuliani "was upset. He was angry. And I think he tapped into not only the mood of the crowd, but also the mood of the country, in a sense."

The media reacted strongly in support of Giuliani. Fox News Channel's John Gibson scored a twofer (5/17/07) by mangling Paul's words ("Paul suggested that the U.S. actually had a hand in the terrorist attacks") and then linking him to the Democratic Party, citing a poll that claims many Democrats "think President Bush knew about the 9/11 attacks beforehand.... It wouldn't have stunned me had it come up in the Democratic debate, but it's a jaw-dropper to see it in the Republican debate." Time magazine's Joe Klein declared it to be Paul's "singular moment of weirdness," and that Giuliani "reduced Paul to history."

Lost amidst the media excitement over Giuliani's response was whether or not Paul was correct. The Nation's John Nichols wrote a column (5/16/07) pointing out that Paul's argument more or less echoed the findings of the 9/11 Commission, which noted that Osama bin Laden had called in 1996 for Muslims to drive U.S. troops out of Saudi Arabia--whose mission there was largely to support air patrols over Iraq--and that subsequent statements rallied followers to oppose U.S. policy in Israel/Palestine and Iraq. Such discussions are common in academic and policy circles, but not so in the mainstream media.

Such evidence was rarely even considered. MSNBC host Chris Matthews declared (5/16/07), "Ron Paul has a big problem, by the way." While Matthews granted that it was important for Americans to "understand the simmering hatred and the hostility, the sea of hostility, over there," Paul's comments were unacceptable on factual grounds: "You can't say it's because we put troops in Iraq, over the no-fly zone, because they tried to blow up that same building back in '93, before all these skirmishes over the no-fly zone. You can't say that particular argument."

Paul actually made no reference to the no-fly zones in his debate remarks. But if that's what Matthews thought Paul was referring to, the cable news host should be aware that the no-fly policy was first declared in 1991, and that there was an extensive series of air raids in support of the no-fly zones in January 1993--a month before the 1993 attack.

When Paul convened a press conference on May 24 at the National Press Club featuring former CIA terrorism expert Michael Scheurer, the press ignored the event, although reporters have interviewed Scheurer regularly for several years. The fact that Scheurer essentially agrees with Paul's premise, as he explained to AntiWar radio (5/18/07), might explain the media's ambivalence.

CNN host Howard Kurtz (5/20/07) slammed Paul's "unorthodox theory" about the 9/11 attacks, declaring that "news organizations are allowing ego-driven fringe candidates to muck up debates among those with an actual shot at the White House." The real problem isn't that Ron Paul can't win the White House, or that he might "muck up" a debate; if anything, he started a debate the media don't want to have.

The first role of the corporate press in an election cycle is to weed out candidates who they deem nonviable. This usually means choosing not to cover candidates whose ideas that fall outside the Beltway conventional wisdom (e.g., Dennis Kucinich), or those who reporters decide  have no real chance of winning the nomination.

The speculation that reality TV star/mogul Donald Trump might run in 2012 flips the narrative around--and demonstrates the fact that the media can change the "rules" whenever they want. Trump is extremely unlikely to actually run, and his "ideas" mostly revolve around a long-debunked conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not born where he was born. So by any normal standard he would get no coverage. But he's perhaps the dominant feature of the early campaign coverage, making a string of television appearances that a supposedly marginal candidate would never enjoy.

What gives? Some reporters have tried to find ways to explain why this is so, or at least justify the attention. Take Dan Balz in the Washington Post (4/24/11):

The New York businessman has grabbed headlines with his provocative remarks on President Obama's birthplace. He continues to question whether the president was born in Hawaii, despite ample evidence that he was. But what he has had to say about real issues deserves as much attention as his "birther" comments.

I wish he were saying that since Trump's birtherism deserves no coverage,  his thoughts about "real issues" deserve the same.

But Balz seems to be arguing that since Trump's nutty conspiracy-mongering  makes news, his other ideas deserve to make news too.  All this coming from a guy no one seems to think has any intention of actually mounting a serious campaign. This is an extremely odd justification, at odds with the normal rules of Beltway journalism.

Amidst this backdrop, Republican Rep. Ron Paul of Texas will apparently announce his intention today to run in 2012. He was a candidate in 2008 that media mostly left out of their campaign coverage, despite the fact that he had a core of dedicated volunteers and an impressive ability to raise money (one of the things that media normally treat as very important).

Ron Paul is, in other words, was an actual candidate, and is likely to be one again. But will he enjoy even a tiny fraction of the coverage given to Donald Trump? Don't bet on it.