Ralph Nader

“ Without coverage, you can't make headway in the polls. And a poor showing in the polls in turn distances the media from the campaign. Meanwhile, the issues your campaign seeks to address remain below the radar of the major candidates and the campaign press. Having worked with the print and broadcast media throughout my career as a consumer advocate, I had no illusions when I launched my campaign about the difficulties I would face in convincing reporters, editors, and producers for the major news outlets that my candidacy deserved their coverage. ”

“ There were reporters, like Maria Recio of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and Tom Squitieri of USA Today, who saw early on the significance of our campaign both directly for its agenda and indirectly for its impact on the major-party candidates, and who persuaded their editors to allow more regular travel with the campaign. Their sense of the campaign's importance was shared by Tim Russert of NBC's Meet the Press, who invited me on his show five times, and Chris Matthews of MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews, who had me on three times. ”

“ Then I would add that we are trying to build a long-range political reform movement to dislodge the control of our government from the grip of the permanent corporate government in Washington, D.C., represented by more than 16,000 lobbyists swarming over the city, with their nearly 1,600 corporate political action committees and soft-money contributions, fueling both parties with equal-opportunity corruption. ”

“ Instead, they'd parachute in a reporter to travel with us for a few days and file a profile of our campaign that focused on personality and the so-called spoiler issue rather than on substance. We were never a news beat, even when the margins narrowed between Al Gore and George W. Bush during the last month and made our voters more consequential.
Back in the spring, however, hope sprung eternal. In April, a Zogby America poll put us at 5 percent nationwide. Our audiences were growing, and we had an exhaustive agenda that was of compelling concern to millions of Americans. ”

“ We supported a living wage; stronger trade-union organization laws; universal health insurance; strong environmental measures; redirection of public budgets from corporate welfare to neighborhood and community needs; a crackdown on corporate crime against consumers, especially those in ghettos; public funding of election campaigns; protection of the small-farm economy from giant agribusiness abuses ”