Watch this video from the CBS Evening News last Sunday, December 4.  At this point it was clear that Herman Cain was ending his run for the presidency and a new Des Moines Register poll had just shown that Newt Gingrich was the new front runner.  Iowa is one of the first states to select its convention delegates, and thus it is closely watched by all involved in and interested in politics.

So according to the report, it’s now a three way race between Gingrich and Romney.  This in spite of the fact that second place in the Des Moines Register poll went not to Romney, but to Ron Paul.  He’s pretty much ignored in this report.  I first noticed the phenomenon when it was pointed out on The Daily Show on August 15, 2011 just after the Iowa straw poll and Pawlenty dropped out of the race.  In this clip, Jon Stewart notes the media’s reluctance to treat Paul as a serious candidate, even on ultra-conservative Fox News.

Nothing has changed in the four months since.  Let’s review the slate of front runners in the Republican race for the nomination between now and that report in August.  Gingrich is the comeback kid.  This is the second time he’s been seen as a front runner, and it was only a few months ago he was considered dead in the water.  Romney has been a consistent front runner and many seem to think he’ll get the nomination in the end.  He can’t manage to hold the media spotlight because in the cast of characters that is the current slate of contenders for the nomination, he’s just not that interesting.  Bachmann was the media darling for a while, but she settled down into the middle of the pack right around the time that Sarah Palin said she wouldn’t run, and shortly after the Newsweek cover story. Cain rose from nowhere to a place among the top of the pack, and then the sexual harassment allegations started to come forward, followed by other allegations of sexual impropriety.  I couldn’t kept track of the charges.  Perry seemed like he might be the salvation of the party, until he actually had to perform in live debates.

Throughout this time Ron Paul has consistently been in the the top of the pack, not the leader, but in the top half, often second place.  There are other candidates are suffering from a lack of coverage such as Rick Santorum or John Huntsman, but they have consistently been toward the bottom of the pack.  The question is, if Ron Paul is coin this well without the media hype, what would happen if they did heap coverage on him like they’ve done with the others.  Like them, he’d either collapse under the scrutiny or surge in the polls.

I am not bothered by the lack of coverage because I am a Ron Paul supporter.  I am bothered because it is as if the establishment has decided he will not be the candidate regardless of the wishes of the Republican voters.  I think the same thing happens on the Democratic side as well.  Both parties have outsider candidates who just don’t get taken seriously.  In most cases it’s possible to dismiss them as not viable, like in the case of Dennis Kucinich, because they never get sufficient traction in the polls to prove otherwise.  This was also true of Ron Paul himself in 2008.

This year, however, the media has declared one candidate after another the front runner, only to watch them fall, and all the while Ron Paul has hovered there with numbers as good or better than those would be nominees.  Is it the place of the media to decide for us who the viable candidates are? Part of me wonders if Ron Paul were to suddenly surge on a popular groundswell of support, would he even be allowed to take the nomination.  Something is rotten.