It has been clear for some time now that the corporate media is actively excluding John Edwards from its coverage of the 2008 race.

After Iowa, there was every reason for the corporate media to have started including John Edwards in its narrative. After all, even though Edwards had been third place since the summer, trailing Hillary by double-digits in several polls, he erased that gap completely, and he did so on a relative shoestring budget. As BruinKid has shown, Hillary and Obama each spent twice as much per vote as Edwards.

But instead of paying more intention to Edwards, since Iowa the corporate media is paying less attention. The corporate media blackout of John Edwards continues, and it's getting worse.

One way of measuring the corporate media's systematic exclusion of Edwards is to look at the frequency his name is mentioned during news broadcasts. CNN publishes a transcript of its programming, so I was able to run a quick analysis comparing how frequently they mentioned his name on caucus night to the day after caucus.

Here's the night of the caucus:

Here's the next day:

It's no surprise that Barack Obama got the most attention; he won the Iowa caucus, and as much as I wish he hadn't won it, I can't begrudge the fact that CNN told its viewers about it.

But there's no good reason for Edwards' coverage to fall the day AFTER the caucus. It should have gone UP not down; the news of Obama's victory had already been told, and Edwards' strong showing in Iowa should indicate a strong reservoir of support.

Even relative to Hillary, Edwards' coverage declined: on the day of the caucus, Edwards received 41% of the mentions of either Edwards or Hillary; they day after the caucus, he received just 36%, despite narrowly edging Hillary out, even though she'd led Edwards in nearly every poll for the preceding five months.

NBC News, er, General Electric News, provided perhaps the most shocking example of the corporate media blackout of John Edwards. They gave him just four seconds out of nearly nine minutes of political coverage last night, and said that Edwards had finished BEHIND Hillary.

Another way of looking at the corporate media blackout is analyzing the frequency with which Edwards is mentioned in multi-candidate headlines.

According to a search of the Google News archive, in 2007 Edwards was systematically excluded from coverage of the 2008 race, which the corporate media portrayed as a choice between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama:

Amazingly, since Iowa, this exclusion has gotten WORSE.

As you can see, Obama's share of coverage increased relative to Hillary's, but Edwards fell relative to both of them.

The growing corporate media blackout of John Edwards is really a rather extraordinary development.

Edwards spent $2.7 million on TV ads in Iowa, compared to $8.3 million for Obama and $6.5 million for Hillary.

Edwards had 175 paid staffers in Iowa compared to 300 for Obama and 400 for Hillary.

Edwards had been in third place since August, trailing both Hillary and Obama in nearly every poll.

Obama's victory was clearly the "news of the day," but Edwards' surprise second-place showing should have put him back in the discussion, just like Bill Clinton's eight point loss in New Hampshire in 1992 sent him on his way to the White House.

Instead, the corporate media stepped up its campaign of exclusion.

Here's an example of Chris Matthews from caucus night. In this video he praises Hillary's campaign for plotting a brilliant comeback strategy, yet browbeats Edwards.

Here's a longer clip from last night's General Electric news, including a report from Andrea Mitchell aka Mrs. Alan Greenspan. NBC doesn't pull any punches: their systematic exclusion of John Edwards is extraordinary. Edwards was mentioned once in their entire broadcast, and in that one mention, they said that he had finished behind Hillary.

The choice in this election is clear.

We've got a field of three strong candidates. There are good reasons to vote for any of them.

If you think that corporate greed and corporate power are at the heart of America's problems, however, there's really only one choice: John Edwards.

It is John Edwards' voice that has been systematically excluded from the debate. It's been excluded by the propaganda arm of the corporate elites who stand to lose the most if his campaign is successful.

John Edwards isn't being excluded because people aren't interested in his message. The Iowa results prove that. He came in second despite being outspent and despite being shut out by the corporate media.

John Edwards is being excluded because he is talking about something that makes the corporate media truly uncomfortable: the growing concentration of power and wealth in the corporate elite.

We aren't powerless in the face of corporate power. We can start the peaceful revolution; we can start stripping the corporate giants of their authority.

We can donate, volunteer, and vote. We can tell our friends and family and neighbors about what is going.

We can tell them: you have a choice. You don't have to vote for who the corporate media chooses. You can vote for real change. You can vote to change the system.

It's in your hands. It's in our hands.

I'm working on a longer post with some new numbers, but for now I'm going to post these videos which convey what I'm talking about in this post's headline.

Here's something you might not know about Mike Huckabee: he wants to ban some forms of contraception, including the birth control pill, Plan B (aka "the morning after pill"), and RU-486.

This isn't a position he privately whispered into somebody's ear.

He has said it publicly, and there's video.

Here's a transcript of the video, which is from Huckabee's April 13, 2007 interview with The Des Moines Register editorial board.

HUCKABEE: There are some forms of birth control that really are the destruction of a fertilized egg.

QUESTIONER (male voice): Should the government ban that sort of birth control?

QUESTIONER (female voice): RU-486? The morning after pill? Birth control pills?

HUCKABEE: Yeah, I, I personally think there are better ways to deal with contraception than destroying a human life. So, again I’m going to say that I’m always going to make my position on the side of protecting human life.

Mike Huckabee may be an affable religious extremist, but he's still a religious extremist.

We already knew he wants to take away a woman's right to choose whether or not to continue a pregnancy.

Now we know he also wants to limit a woman's ability to choose whether or not to get pregnant in the first place.

Mike Huckabee is the modern Republican Party, and he's scary.

Tonight really was a victory for change. Edwards finished second, despite being heavily outspent and largely ignored by the mainstream media.

He heads to New Hampshire with momentum. Obama, who depended on Republican women and independent men for his victory will run into a problem in New Hampshire, where John McCain is resurgent. Because of Mike Huckabee's victory, Mitt Romney has lost momentum.

John McCain is the new flavor of the day, and he'll pull Obama supporters. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton is going to go nuclear on Obama.

While Clinton and Obama fight it out, Edwards simply needs to continue with his message about the need to stand up to powerful interests and take back our country.

Here's his speech from tonight:

I wish I could tell you that John Edwards were unflawed, but I can't. He, like every other living politician I've ever known, proves the axiom: no politician is a perfect hero. They all make mistakes, and some of those mistakes are devastating.

Not all politicians admit or learn from their mistakes. The ones who do learn are the ones who can become transcendent leaders, for to understand the path forward to progress one must also understand the road traveled to failure.

The biggest mistake of John Edwards' political career is well-known: his vote for the Iraq War Resolution. John Edwards owned up to that mistake in 2005 and in doing so began the process of learning from his failure.

Today, I want to focus on Joe Lieberman as a symbol of the Democratic Party's failure -- and rebirth -- because Joe Lieberman is at the heart of what ails the Democratic Party.

In a very real way, overcoming the false promise represented by Joe Lieberman is what stands between our party continuing as an institution slavishly devoted to the establishment, or as one that can actually deliver a new distribution of power in America.

Most of us on Daily Kos are firmly on the "new" side of that equation, but unfortunately, many of our leaders are not.

But thing do change.

Al Gore is as close to a living political hero as I've got, and that's probably only because he has had the wisdom to not seek office.

What does Al Gore have to do with John Edwards, Joe Lieberman, and the theme of this post?

It's simple: Al Gore overcame Joe Lieberman.

In 2000, Al Gore made the worst mistake of his political career: he selected Joe Lieberman as his running mate. (If SCOTUS hadn't stopped the recount and Gore had won his rightful victory, perhaps Gore could have muzzled Joe after 9/11; we'll never know, but it's not something I like to ponder.)

Since Lieberman's vice presidential run, he has done more to hurt the Democratic Party than any other current or former Democrat. By comparison, turncoats like Zell Miller are irrelevant sideshows.

It wasn't long after the 2000 election before Al Gore realized what a horrible mistake he had made in selecting Lieberman. After Lieberman authored the Iraq War Resolution, Gore spoke out against Lieberman, and in 2003 he endorsed Howard Dean. Together, Gore and Dean in different ways are the national politicians leaders most responsible for the resurgence of progressivism in American public life.

In 2006, when Joe Lieberman sought renomination as the Democratic Party's candidate for U.S. Senate, Democrats in Connecticut stood together and said enough is enough. They denied Lieberman The Democratic Party's nomination.

Al Gore, despite his long history with Lieberman and despite having selected Lieberman as his vice president, refused to endorse Lieberman.

Some might want to criticize Gore for not endorsing Lamont, but I don't. Lieberman was an incumbent, and Gore's refusal to endorse Lieberman said everything that one needed to know about where he stood on the race.

Compare and contrast Gore's involvement (or lack thereof) in the 2006 battle between Lieberman and Lamont with that of Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards.

Both Obama and Hillary endorsed Lieberman in the primary and contributed to his campaign. Obama actually called Lieberman his mentor and personally campaigned on his behalf. Shortly before the election, Bill Clinton went on the campaign trail with Joe Lieberman.

It won't surprise any supporter of John Edwards to learn that like Al Gore, he didn't lift a finger to help Lieberman's re-nomination battle. Indeed, Edwards was the first party leader to congratulate Ned Lamont after winning, and actually went on the campaign trail with Lamont within days of the primary.

Edwards rallies for Lamont crowd

Aug 18, 2006 2:09 PM
Mary E. O’Leary
New Haven Register
Aug 18, 2006

NEW HAVEN — Former vice-presidential candidate John Edwards rallied several hundred people Thursday in a rousing populist speech for U.S. Democratic Senate candidate Ned Lamont, telling the crowd Americans are eager for change and real leaders.

...

Last week, Lamont won the Democratic primary against three-term incumbent Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman by 10,000 votes in what was seen as a referendum on the war on Iraq and Lieberman’s support for that and other policies supported by the Bush administration.

Edwards, who was the Democratic candidate for vice president in 2004, while Lieberman served that role in 2000, said he thinks Lieberman should drop his independent candidacy. Edwards is one of some 27 current and past senators backing Lamont in the race.

With a huge American flag as a backdrop, Lamont said "one of the first calls that Joe Lieberman got (after the primary) was from Karl Rove (Bush’s senior adviser). The first call I got was from John Edwards," Lamont said as example of Lieberman’s popularity with Republicans, which a poll Thursday said gives him an edge in the November election.

In addition to the rally, Edwards also headlined a fundraiser for Lamont and e-mailed his supporters to contribute to Lamont's campaign.

Sure, there's no doubt he could have done more. You can always do more.

The essential point is that Edwards made the right political decision. He didn't lift a finger for Lieberman, and after the primary, he showed up in person to help Ned Lamont. Even if the only reason he did so was self-interest, it shows that John Edwards thinks his self-interest is aligned with Democrats like Ned Lamont, not turncoats like Joe Lieberman.

It's well-known that Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton offered Joe Lieberman their support during the primary. Frankly, I don't understand how they could support Lieberman after what Lieberman did to Bill Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal, but politics is to a large degree personal, and as wrong as the Clintons were to support Lieberman, at least they had strong personal ties developed over several decades, starting when Bill and Hillary were at Yale Law and Lieberman was a young pol in New Haven.

(I should note that while Chris Dodd supported Lieberman in the primary, it's hard to hold that against him; incumbent Senators of opposing parties frequently don't get involved in each other's races, let alone ones from the same party, at least nominally. It's telling that Ned Lamont has endorsed Chris Dodd's presidential campaign is has worked the trail in Iowa on Dodd's behalf.)

Barack Obama's role in the Lieberman-Lamont primary stands out in stark contrast to that of John Edwards.

Obama, as he tells us on the trail, has very little Washington experience.

To compensate for that, after Obama's election, he turned to Joe Lieberman for help in learning the ways of Washington. Soon, Obama was calling Joe Lieberman his "mentor" in the Senate. As Joe Conason wrote:

Should Obama hope to continue to enjoy his free ride, he should consult his old mentor Joe Lieberman, the senator from Connecticut who used to be a Democrat. Conservative commentators and right-wing media outlets always loved Lieberman for his willingness to echo their talking points on subjects such as school vouchers and Social Security privatization. When he agreed to join the Democratic ticket as Al Gore's running mate in 2000, the Weekly Standard and the National Review, among others, suddenly discovered how despicable Lieberman actually was. Having abandoned the Democrats altogether, he is now fully rehabilitated.

Obama didn't stop at calling the author of the Iraq War Resolution his "mentor," however.

Obama not only contributed money to Lieberman's primary campaign, he joined Lieberman on the campaign trail.

Obama rallies state Democrats, throws support behind Lieberman

By Stephanie Reitz, Associated Press Writer | March 31, 2006

HARTFORD, Conn. --U.S. Sen. Barack Obama rallied Connecticut Democrats at their annual dinner Thursday night, throwing his support behind mentor and Senate colleague Joe Lieberman.

Obama, an Illinois Democrat who is considered a rising star in the party, was the keynote speaker at the annual Jefferson Jackson Bailey Dinner.

Lieberman, Connecticut's junior senator, is under fire from some liberal Democrats for his support of the Iraq War. He was key in booking Obama, who routinely receives more than 200 speaking invitations each week.

...

Lieberman became Obama's mentor when Obama was sworn into the Senate in 2005. They stayed close at Thursday night's event, too, entering the room together and working the crowd in tandem.

Put simply, Barack Obama personally worked to defeat Ned Lamont.

That's change, but it's change in the wrong direction.

After the primary, Obama endorsed Lamont, but he (like Hillary) never campaigned with Lamont, despite requests.

In 2002, Obama bravely opposed the Iraq War. Since then, his record hasn't been pure:

Obama did hedge his Iraq war opposition at times

Barack Obama has made a lot about his outspoken opposition to the Iraq war, even before it started. And he has used his opponents' initial votes in support of the war against them frequently as proof that he has the judgment to be president.

On Sunday's "Meet the Press" interrogation, host Tim Russert quizzed the Illinois senator closely on a number of apparent inconsistencies between his actions and stated positions -- taking state lobbyists' contributions while criticizing federal lobbyists' contributions to his opponents, and not releasing documents, schedules, memos, etc., from his days as an Illinois state senator while criticizing Hillary Clinton for not releasing papers from her White House years.

Russert also inquired about inconsistent quotes by Obama about the Iraq war, leading to this exchange:

RUSSERT: You were not in the Senate in October of 2002. You did give a speech opposing the war. But Sen. Clinton’s campaign will say since you’ve been a senator there’s been no difference in your record. And other critics will say that you’ve not been a leader against the war, and they point to this: In July of '04, Barack Obama, “I’m not privy to Senate intelligence reports. What would I have done? I don’t know,” in terms of how you would have voted on the war. And then this: “There’s not much of a difference between my position on Iraq and George Bush’s position at this stage.” That was July of '04. And this: “I think” there’s “some room for disagreement in that initial decision to vote for authorization of the war.” It doesn’t seem that you are firmly wedded against the war, and that you left some wiggle room that, if you had been in the Senate, you may have voted for it.

Simply put, though the Weekly Standard calls him Saint Barack of Iowa, Barack Obama is every bit as imperfect as any other politician.

Over the years, Barack Obama has changed and John Edwards has changed.

They have both changed, but Edwards changed in the right direction. Despite his many accomplishments as a U.S. Senator, Obama has been less consistent. I'm not slamming Obama; he's gotten some important things done. I'm just offering a reminder that he, like John Edwards, is imperfect.

Most importantly, what most clearly separates John Edwards and Barack Obama is their different theories of change.

Edwards advocates an aggressive, combative approach to political change.

Obama favors a more conciliatory, post-partisan approach to political change.

I think the example of Joe Lieberman is a pretty good example showing that Obama's strategy is doomed to fail.

There's no question that Lieberman was a Democratic turncoat, but there's also no question that Lieberman was an important source of power in Washington, DC. He was the kind of guy you needed on your side to get things done from within.

So Obama teamed up with Lieberman, becoming his mentor, and working for his renomination, trying to change from within. That doesn't mean Obama agreed with Lieberman on Iraq; in fact, Obama pointed out that he disagreed with Lieberman on Iraq.

However, Obama felt that working with Joe Lieberman was an important way to accomplish positive change. Although Obama was unsuccessful in the primary, Lieberman did win re-election, thanks in part to the support of Democrats like Clinton and Obama and their decision to effectively stand on the sidelines during the general.

In short, Barack Obama stuck his neck out for Joe Lieberman.

What has Lieberman done to repay him?

It's true that Lieberman helped Obama passed his lobbying reform measures, but if the cost of those reforms was acceptance of Joe Lieberman's continued cheerleading for Iraq, I don't think any of us would have made that bargain.

More recently, Lieberman stuck a knife in Obama's back when he endorsed John McCain. Now, a Lieberman endorsement of Obama would obviously do Obama no good, but Lieberman's endorsement of McCain is actually going to hurt Obama in New Hampshire, where independents and perhaps even some conservative Democrats who would have supported Obama are now more likely to support John McCain.

The obvious moral of this story is that placating bad people like Joe Lieberman just doesn't work.

Barack Obama is a good guy, and the hopeful attitude he displayed in his support for Lieberman is almost endearingly naive, but it has got him -- and more importantly, us -- absolutely nowhere. In fact, it is probably taken us backwards.

It's time that we as a party shifted gears; it's time that we embrace a new approach, one that the establishment and governing regime will no doubt oppose, but one that will actually get us some positive results.

If we as Democrats ignore the lesson taught to us by Al Gore when he overcame Joe Lieberman, we will struggle.

We need to find our own voice, and to speak with it.

Our goal can't be to have the ruling elites listen to our voices, or to hear us out.

Our goal is it change the dominant power structure. For too long, tiny group of people has grown more and more powerful. This is our country, too. It's time we take it back, not just for us, but for all Americans.

This post is a quantitative addendum to an excellent Daily Kos diary discussing the qualitative aspects of the MSM blackout of John Edwards.

Before I delve into any of the numbers, I want to make an important point: nothing I say in this post in any way diminishes what the MSM has done to the other candidates in the race -- Biden, Dodd, Kucinich, and Richardson. The fact that Edwards has received more extensive coverage than these candidates gives you a sense of just how egregiously their campaigns have been slighted by the MSM filter. Moreover, I take nothing at all away from the copious coverage received by the Hillary and Obama campaigns -- I wish the MSM would cover all of us more.

The numbers that I compiled below are a simple way of illustrating that the MSM is actively excluding Edwards from the national dialog the Democratic nomination battle.

When the year began, no impartial observer would have discounted John Edwards' chances, yet for the year, Edwards has appeared in just 18% of the multi-candidate headlines in the New York Times, compared to 93% for Hillary and 91% for Obama.

(When I say multi-candidate headline, I mean a headline which mentions at least two of the top three Democratic candidates. The point of looking at these headlines is that the active exclusion of Edwards from the debate frames the contest as between Obama and Hillary, when it's actually a multi-way contest.)

Even now, with John Edwards surging in Iowa (he's now tied for 2nd with Obama in a "poll of polls" and has gained 3.4 points in these polls over the last month, compared to 2.6 points for Hillary and -2.0 points for Obama), the MSM is continuing this pattern of exclusion.

Of all the multi-candidate headlines on Google News, Edwards appears in just 8%, compared to 97% for Obama and 95% for Clinton.

In other words, out of 2,901 multi-candidate headlines, Edwards appeared in only 228. Obama appeared in 2,813. Hillary, 2,761.

This, my friends, is a f**king blackout.

There's no excuse for this.

First, as I mentioned above, John Edwards is surging in Iowa and may well win.

Second, he's closing the gap in New Hampshire -- climbing to within 10 points.

Third, the fact that he trails national polls is absolutely meaningless. I recently found 13 polls taken in the six weeks before Iowa. In one of those polls, they tested Hillary for the nomination -- and she was the national frontrunner with 43%. Remember, that was in 2004! In the other 12 polls, Kerry cracked the top 3 only once. In other words, out of 36 chances to get into the top three, he did so only once -- tied for 3rd. Dean, Clark, Lieberman, and Gephardt all were beating him.

Put simply, in the only places where there's actually going to be voting anytime soon, Edwards is on the same level as Hillary and Obama amongst the electorate -- yet the MSM excludes him from their framing of the race.

Imagine how much better he could be doing if they didn't try to cut him out of the picture?

The MSM blackout is also reflected in an analysis of all headlines in general, including single-candidate headlines.

In the New York Times, there have been 385 headlines mentioning a Edwards, Clinton, or Obama. Clinton is in 55%, Obama 38%, Edwards 19%. (This adds up to more than 100% because of multi-candidate headlines.)

Google News also reflects the same framing. Out of 27,548 headlines, Edwards is only mentioned in 5,254:

It's very important to note that these numbers actually OVERSTATE the coverage of John Edwards because Edwards is a common name. Unlike in the multi-candidate headlines, when any mention of Edwards is nearly certain to be about the Edwards campaign, in headlines that just mention Edwards, you also get articles about Herm Edwards (KC Chiefs head coach) and other famous Edwardses.

Why is the media doing everything it can to exclude Edwards from its frame on the 2008 election?

In my own view, it's because he more than any other candidate is calling bullshit on their corrupt system. For example:

Nobody likes having their power taken away. (Just wait until you see the expression on Cheney's face on 1/20/2009.)

That's why the MSM fear John Edwards.

I've pulled together a "poll of polls" for the Iowa caucus using all five polls conducted entirely since Christmas.

Here's the top-line for both the Democratic and Republican fields:

As I have noted before, trends are more important than snapshots, especially with the Iowa caucus.

Fortunately, each of the five post-Christmas polls was conducted by an organization that also conducted an Iowa poll in late November or early December.

As a result, it's possible to make assess trends using apples-to-apples comparisons of polls by the same polling organization. This mostly factors out difference in turnout models (a huge source of error in Iowa) in assessing trends in candidate preferences.

Here's a chart of the Democratic race (I excluded Richardson, who is trending down and is well below the 15% viability threshold):

Here's a chart of the Republican race (I included each of the top six candidates because Republicans don't have the same 15% threshold rule and also to show John McCain's progress which may be developing into a bit of a surge, and we all know how much he likes surges):

Here's the raw data for the Democrats:

Here's the raw data for the Republicans: