Breaking through the media barrier
Three Green Party candidates find a way to get mainstream coverage 
By Matt Funiciello
Green Party of New York State

	"Every major media venue was now  interested in the  campaign, right on down to the local  rock stations."  --Aaron Dixon

The nation's increasingly centralized and corporate media does little to advance the causes popularly championed by alternative political parties like the Green Party. This is most apparent during each election cycle when it comes to coverage of "alternative party" candidates. 

As a party, Greens are vigorous campaigners. Candidates send out a continuous stream of press releases during their campaigns and often travel long distances for media events, only to find that the press willfully ignores them. This unofficial media "greenlist" is one of the largest stumbling blocks the Green Party encounters on its road to becoming a truly meaningful progressive force in Ameri­can politics. 

A question for the next decade is: Will the Green Party become a more accepted voice for peace and social justice, or just another movement successfully stalled by the corporate media machine? The answer may well lie in the party's ability to be creative and to actively seek 'guerrilla' strategies to get good coverage. 

This campaign season, some Green candidates have discovered inventive ways to gain greater coverage. While many Greens turned to alternative and independent media to fill the void, there were some Green candidates who managed to penetrate the mass media's armor. Here is how some candidates got mainstream endorsements or a front-page story.

An endorsement from a conservative paper

The Green Party candidate for governor in Illinois was Rich Whitney. The Rock­ford Register Star, a Gannett newspaper with a circulation of 150,000, decided to endorse him. Despite its conservative leaning, the editorial board wasn't even close to being divided about their endorsement. Out of nine members, five supported Whitney, two the Repub­lican candidate and two the Democrat. Whitney's campaign ended up garnering about 10 percent of the total vote in the state.

The Register Star had endorsed a Repub­lican candidate in the Governor's race for over 43 years. During the 2006 campaign allegations of corruption dogged the incumbent Democrat. According to the Register Star's editorial, "The Republican candidate is conducting a negative and unfocused campaign that doesn't inspire confidence she could lead the state. Her main qualification (for the position) is having a lower indictment potential than the incumbent." 

The editorial board's choice of a Green for governor was based on their time spent with him. "We believe Whitney, a 51-year-old attorney from Carbondale, could clean up state government while leading Illinois toward school finance reform, job growth, environmental responsibility and social justice," the editorial said. 

"Contacted at his office, Wally Haas, one of the paper's editors, was ad­amant that the Register Star's shift was not a purposeful decision 'against the two parties' but was simply the 'obvious choice'. "We held editorial board meetings with each candidate and Whitney was the most credible candidate. There was displeasure with the two major party candidates and Rich Whitney's overall presentation made him viable. He had a good approach with the issues and did not accept corporate money. He also supported some key issues that the paper had backed, including a school funding initiative, ... that didn't hurt."

A candidate's arrest brings national attention

Aaron Dixon marched with Martin Luther King Jr. as a youngster and later became a captain of the Seattle Black Panther Party. In 2002, Dixon founded Central House, which provides transitional housing for homeless young adults while they finish school or work. Dixon is also behind Central House's, Youth Leadership Project, which operates in four of Seattle's public high schools. This past year he decided to add Washington's Green Party candidate for U.S. Senate to his lengthy resume. 

Although Dixon ended up with just over 21,000 votes he built a substantial support base for his campaign. While he was officially endorsed by a handful of elected officials, he was endorsed by hundreds of people from the antiwar, labor, and activists communities, as well as by artists and individual citizens. It wasn't due to his unique endorsements, however, that Dixon ended up making national media waves. 

The exclusion of Green candidates from electoral debates has led to some media coverage across the country. Dixon's campaign was no exception. He was excluded from debates hosted by television station owned by King Media for not having at least a million dollars in his campaign fund. When Dixon showed up at the debates anyway, he was arrested. Although he was never formally charged with trespassing, he was brought to a police station holding cell and not released until the debates were over. 

The arrest sparked substantial media interest throughout the state. It also led to an interview with Pacifica Radio's Amy Goodman on her program Democracy Now!. Dixon said that his history in Seattle as a Black Panther Party member was a large factor in getting the mainstream press to pay attention to his campaign from the beginning, but the exclusion and arrest really helped him get more fully covered by local press. 

While people outside the Evergreen state may think that Dixon was on Democracy Now! immediately after the arrest, the interview actually occurred more than two weeks later. He thinks the initial media interest in his arrest within the state led to the national interview, not the other way around. 

"People were saying, 'Here's a guy running without much money and here are all these millionaires excluding him from the debates because he doesn't have a million dollars.' I think it struck a chord with average Americans in this state. Every major media venue was now interested in the campaign, right on down to the local rock stations," Dixon said.

Democrat scandal throws attention to Green

While debate exclusion worked for Aaron Dixon, scandal (and being prepared for it) worked well for Julia Willebrand, Green Party candidate for comptroller of New York. She was the beneficiary of a full-page article in the New York Daily News, the seventh largest newspaper in the country. As nearly 800,000 readers saw Willebrand's story, it gave her an "out-of-the-park home run" unique in the annals of Green media coverage. At nearly 110,000 votes, Willebrand received twice the total votes of any of the other state "Green Peace Slate" candidates. 

How did she accomplish this? "Good luck favors the well-prepared," says Wille­brand. This election, Alan Hevesi, the incumbent Democrat, was having a tough time in the press. He was accused of using public funds to provide a chauffeur for his wife. The press took to calling the story "Chauffeurgate". Eliot Spitzer, attorney general and now governor of New York, was publicly considering the withdrawal of his endorsement of Hevesi. Newspapers were making attacks daily and many Republicans were calling for Hevesi's resignation. It would seem Willebrand was in the right place at the right time, and she was ready to take full advantage of it.

The New York Daily News is considered a conservative newspaper, and like other right-leaning media enterprises often gives third parties a little coverage believing it will negatively impact a particular 'liberal' candidate. Regardless of their intent, Willebrand was ready for them when they came calling. She made herself available for interviews and didn't allow the press to create a simple 'reaction' story to Hevesi's scandal. She challenged them to write about her issues. To her credit, most of the story on Willebrand is really about her campaign. 

While most Green candidates can't count on a home run like this, they can certainly be ready by familiarizing themselves with the opposition and the issues. They can make sure the press is fully aware of how to contact the campaign should the need arise, and how best to use that sudden interest.

Greens bang on the media door - but how do they get in?

Despite a few successes the majority of Green Party and other third party candidates face a stone wall when it comes to media coverage. For example, while Wille­brand was able to get a full-page story in the Daily News, Malachy McCourt, New York Green candidate for governor could not, despite being a best-selling author and well-known actor. He even had trouble getting coverage in a small upstate newspaper, The Glens Falls Post-Star. Although McCourt visited Glens Falls several times there were only four short articles about him in the paper. His opponents, John Faso (R) and Eliot Spitzer (D), had neither ever come to the town, but well over 100 articles about each appeared in the paper.

The two-party coverage consisted almost entirely of wire stories, whereas the stories on McCourt were locally produced. Given the current practice in print media of increasing hegemony and centralization, many smaller corporate papers are severely understaffed, making them dependent on services such as AP and Reuters.

Many Greens have ideas about what methods could effectively combat the two-party media bias. Some favor developing and supporting independent and alternative media, while others feel Greens need to break into corporate media. For some candidates in this past election, arrest, scandal, preparation, and hard work - or a combination of all of four - allowed them to do just that.

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