Most major newspapers didn’t mention Paul's name in their Ames Straw Poll results. Paul supporters decry media neglect

Ron Paul finished just 152 votes behind Michele Bachmann in the Ames Straw Poll, but from the headlines and TV news coverage, it’s hard to tell he even showed up.

With the exception of The New York Times and The Des Moines Register, most major newspaper headlines didn’t even mention his name in their reports of Saturday’s contest. Nor was he anywhere to be found on the Sunday morning talk shows.


By Monday’s second-day stories, Paul had disappeared from the prevailing narrative of the Republican primary race altogether, as consensus coalesced around the dynamics between Bachmann, newcomer Rick Perry and front-runner Mitt Romney.

“We are certainly disappointed, and we think that people are missing a very big story here,” said Jesse Benton, Paul’s campaign manager. “You look at ’07, and Mike Huckabee was able to turn what was a very weak second place — Mitt Romney had 4,516 votes and Huckabee had 2,587 — into a huge national story.”

The Texas congressman’s campaign and supporters blame the curious lack of coverage on the mainstream media’s bias. Though some charge this bias is of the typical liberal variety, most complain it is more of a bias against anyone the media consider an “unelectable” candidate.

Thousands of highly motivated, very wired Paul supporters have been letting the media know their displeasure in no uncertain terms — sending emails to reporters, filling comments sections below columns and even leaving messages on the voicemails of experts quoted in stories they don’t like.

From the perspective of the campaign — which emphasizes it has nothing to do with the independent online activities of Paul’s supporters – the greatest disappointment lies with the television media.

“We were turned down by all the Sunday talk shows, including “Fox News Sunday,” which promised us an interview,” Benton said. “And we were turned down by all the shows today.”

Paul was initially scheduled to appear on NBC’s “Today” show Monday morning, but the appearance was canceled.

“He was tentatively booked, but because of logistics and timing reasons with the news in Indiana and Somalia, we couldn’t do it,” said Megan Kopf, a spokeswoman for “Today.”

Benton said “Meet the Press” was one of several Sunday shows that Paul had a “loose arrangement” with to go on if Paul did well in the straw poll, but when he did, “their answer was, ‘Sorry our show is set.’”

“It was an effort to shut Ron out, no question,” he said.

Betsy Fischer, the executive producer of “Meet the Press,” said she extended Paul an invitation to come on the show two weeks before the straw poll, and his campaign declined.

“I wanted him to come on and make a commitment to come on the show,” she said. “And they wouldn’t make a commitment to come on because they were worried they wouldn’t do well.”

When the campaign, flush with its strong showing, emailed Saturday night, she said the Sunday morning show was already set.

“Obviously, if there’s major breaking news, I’ll change the show on a Saturday, but the bar has to be in the sky.”

Benton said the shutout hasn’t been total, and that CNN and some Fox News shows have had Paul on frequently. CNN’s “John King USA,” for example, has had him on four times since he announced his candidacy in May.

But Paul’s absence from the airwaves since his strong showing in Iowa — a 4,671-vote performance that his campaign points out earned more votes that Mitt Romney’s victory at the straw poll in 2007 — has fueled his supporters’ charges of media bias.

“They concluded that he’s fringe, that his ideas are too far to the right, he’s too radical and they come in with bias,” said Drew Ivers, the Iowa State Chairman for Ron Paul’s presidential campaign committee. “These kinds of attitudes generally come down from the top.”

Paul’s supporters, who run an array of blogs and Facebook groups unaffiliated with the Paul campaign, have been trying to counter this attitude by flooding the inboxes and comments sections of the mainstream media journalists writing about the campaign.

Conservative columnist Michael Walsh became a target for his New York Post column “A two-man race,” and noted the phenomenon Monday on the National Review Online.

“And the winner is … Ron Paul! That, at least, is the conclusion of most of the commenters so far on my New York Post column today,” he wrote, later adding, “Well, I hate to break the news to them, but Ron Paul has about as much chance of becoming president as Lyndon LaRouche.”

Dennis Goldford, a professor of politics at the Drake University and an expert on the Iowa caucuses, found his inbox and voice mail filled with messages from angry Paul supporters after telling The Des Moines Register that Paul had support “an inch wide and a mile deep” left over from the 2007 campaign but that mainstream Republicans have never been comfortable with him.

“Ron Paul supporters are a group of very intensely devoted people who believe he’s an important political figure, and in their view they believe he doesn’t get the respect he deserves,” he told POLITICO.

Despite — or perhaps in part because of — this pushback, political analysts in the mainstream press tend not to take Paul’s candidacy seriously.

“The people in the press have made a judgment that he’s not likely to be someone who is likely to succeed in getting the Republican nomination,” Goldford said.

Stepan Stasishyn is among Paul’s supporters who are critical of the coverage, including a POLITICO story that did not include Paul’s name in the headline (POLITICO did publish a separate story about Paul’s showing in Ames).

“In my opinion, it is not the decision of the media to tell us who is electable and who isn’t,” he said. “That’s what polls are for. But any time a poll comes up in Ron Paul’s favor, the media skips it and instead shows another poll in some other candidate’s favor.”

He pointed to a recent Rasmussen poll showing Ron Paul picking up 37 percent of likely voters’ support, compared to President Obama’s 41 percent, which he said the mainstream media virtually ignored.

Most national polls put Paul at about 9 percent, behind Romney, Perry, Bachmann and Sarah Palin, but well ahead of the other Republicans competing in last weekend’s straw poll. Nate Silver, writing for The New York Times’s FiveThirtyEight blog, projected, based on national polling and the weekend’s results, that Paul would likely come in a close second behind Bachmann in the Iowa caucus.

In a Republican primary characterized by fierce adherence to conservative orthodoxy, Paul proudly displayed his libertarian divergence from these views during last week’s debate, displaying dovish opposition to foreign wars and a live-and-let-live approach to social issues that most Americans are used to hearing come from progressives.

“I think everybody is scared of Ron Paul,” Benton said. “Ron Paul is now a viable candidate for the president of the U.S., granted a long shot, but a viable shot. And he would shake everything up, including long-held dogma in the press.”