Public Please

While reading an article on DemocracyRising.us, I was surprised and disappointed to discover that the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL), a non-partisan Quaker lobbying organization, has engaged in the political censorship of pro-peace candidates.

In their report, Eyes on the Prize: Presidential Candidates on Iraq, Iran and Nuclear Weapons, they omit the perspectives of pro-peace presidential candidates Mike Gravel, Ron Paul, and Ralph Nader. And they omit the perspectives of many third party and independent candidates. The report only includes the positions of John McCain, Mike Huckabee, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama on the grounds that they are they are the leading candidates as measured by vote counts.

According to their methods section, they only include candidates that meet the following criteria:

a) The candidate polls at five percent or greater for one month in an early primary state or nationally; and
b) The candidate is actively campaigning

So I called the FCNL at 800-630-1330. The man on the phone was very nice and he directed me to the report. I told him I was very concerned about the methodology of the report. I asked him to raise my concerns to the relevant persons at the FCNL, which he said he would. In particular, I asked the FCNL to reconsider their criteria for including candidates based on polling numbers because public polls depend on public knowledge of the candidates and public knowledge of the candidates has been undermined by corporate media censorship of the candidates. I told them how CNN, MSNBC, ABC News, and the Des Moines Register have censored Kucinich and Gravel, by excluding them from the presidential debates. I told them that Ron Paul has also faced censorship from the corporate media. Many other third party and independent candidates are also routinely censored by the corporate media.

I told them that since I have written about the corporate media censorship of these pro-peace candidates, and that I have a “WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER” bumpersticker, I am very concerned about further censorship of these candidates in their presidential reports / voter guides.

It is important to critique those you generally support on important issues like war and peace, and it is especially important to critique organizations that represent egalitarian and peaceful ideals when they systematically censor those who support those ideals. As a non-partisan organization that lobbies for peace, the FCNL should have used a more inclusive methodology for its presidential candidate report. For example, they could have emailed an online survey to all of the presidential candidates to gather their perspectives.

For historical purposes, I’ve archived an copy of the report, Eyes on the Prize: Presidential Candidates on Iraq, Iran and Nuclear Weapons.