Is Rep. Ron Paul getting a raw deal in news coverage of his presidential campaign?
Jon Stewart, the host of “The Daily Show,” thinks so. And so do many fans of Paul, who have taken to e-mail and Twitter to vent their frustration that his strong second-place finish in the Iowa straw poll is being largely ignored.
“It’s absolutely horrendous and despicable the lack of media coverage Ron Paul is getting,” one of them wrote on Twitter.
Readers of The New York Times expressed their views on its coverage of the straw poll in a flurry of e-mails. Paul, a 12-term Republican congressman from Texas, lost to Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota by only 152 votes of the nearly 17,000 cast.
“We live in a democratic republic, where the votes of the people deserve to reported by the media, not editorialized into obscurity,” wrote Matthew Harder.
Richard Timm wrote that “Ron Paul’s second-place finish merited much more attention in your article.
“Even if you don’t believe he can win the nomination,” Timm wrote, “don’t you think it’s worth giving the only anti-war Republican a little more emphasis?”
But some skeptics have pointed out that Paul’s strength at the straw poll seems outsized when compared with his popularity across the country, at least as measured by opinion polls.
Of course, Paul’s followers would say that his low standing in the polls is a result of the failure of the media to adequately report on his successes at events like the straw poll.
