Who Decides Who’ll Be Allowed on TV Debates?

Who Decides Who’ll Be Allowed on TV Debates?
by Bob Egelko

The Nevada Supreme Court’s ruling allowing a cable network to exclude Rep. Dennis Kucinich from a Democratic presidential debate was barely a blip on the media radar screen, quickly forgotten in the reporting of the caucus victories by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and former Gov. Mitt Romney and the squabble over voting in casinos.


But in the long term, the court decision might prove to be as significant as any of the political events in the Nevada campaign. It constituted the strongest judicial statement yet of news organizations’ near-absolute power to control participation in pre-election forums - including the debates scheduled in California next week in advance of the state’s Feb. 5 primary.

Broadcasters’ right to exclude candidates they consider marginal has been established at least since a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in a 1998 case involving a state-owned television station in Arkansas that had excluded a congressional candidate from a debate.

The court said the public station couldn’t factor candidates’ viewpoints into its decisions - a constitutional restriction on government conduct that probably wouldn’t apply to a private broadcaster - but could bar a candidate with little public support on journalistic grounds.

Kucinich, the Ohio congressman who polls in the low single digits but has a fervent following among his party’s anti-war base, presented a different argument to challenge his exclusion from MSNBC’s Jan. 15 debate in Nevada: that the cable channel had promised to let him in when he met its standards, then abruptly changed those standards to keep him out.

MSNBC said initially that the debate was open to Democrats who placed in the top four in a national poll. It invited Kucinich on Jan. 9 after a Gallup Poll a few days earlier ranked him fourth. But two days later, after New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson dropped out of the race, the channel narrowed its criteria to the top three candidates and withdrew Kucinich’s invitation.

The day before the debate, a Nevada judge ordered MSNBC to let Kucinich participate, saying the cable operator had entered into a binding contract that it couldn’t rescind once the candidate accepted. The state’s high court quickly granted review and, an hour before the debate, ruled 7-0 in the cable channel’s favor.

In a terse, five-page decision, the court said MSBNC hadn’t made a contractual promise to Kucinich, just an invitation that it was free to withdraw. It said that courts have no power to require broadcasters to grant equal access to diverse viewpoints and that the judge’s threat to cancel the debate if Kucinich were excluded would amount to an unconstitutional prior restraint on freedom of the press.

The bottom line: Debates, the public’s sole opportunity to see competing candidates in a neutral setting, are the prerogative of the sponsoring organizations - typically, these days, the news media - which set the criteria and have free rein to alter them.

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http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/01/24/6603/

to sponsor the debate themselves, select a location, select a moderator and solicit bids for televising the debate. Then the party could create criteria on who is and isn't invited.

They have every right to lop off the bottom-dwellers once the primaries get rolling. Would you care to rattle off the number of televised debates that Kucinich took part in previous to this one? 5? 10?

He has had ample opportunity to speak to a national audience. The audience listened, and overwhelmingly chose to go with other candidates.

Kucinich isn't in the debates and Edwards has to keep reminding the moderators that he is.