Hello Ron Paul or Goodbye Readers

Times are tough in the newspaper business. Newspapers are losing readers, and, increasingly, advertising dollars to new forms of media unique to the Internet.

Newspapers often defend their offerings against these upstart competitors by citing their editorial function. "The Internet is full of garbage," they say, "and our journalists and editors sort through all the junk for you and report the real story."

In the case of the Presidential Campaign of Congressman Ron Paul, however, newspapers appear to be missing or ignoring the real story, and undermining their credibility in the process.

Ron Paul is a 10-term U.S. Congressman seeking the Republican nomination for President, running on a platform of limited government.

As measured by activity on the Internet, he has generated more interest than any other Presidential candidate. His website gets far more traffic than that of any other candidate. He is the most searched-for candidate on Google. He has the most people connected to him on social networking websites.

His Internet support transfers into real world support. Ron Paul has won more straw polls around the country than any other Republican candidate. He has over 70,000 grassroots volunteers. His poll numbers have gained steadily, and he now polls consistently in the high single digits in spite of polling bias against his younger supporters with cellular phones instead of landlines and against his Independent supporters who did not vote in the 2004 Republican primaries.

His fundraising momentum has been dramatic. On November 5^th, he set the record for most money ever raised in a single day by a Republican candidate for President-more money than George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan ever raised in a single day. He is tracking to be the leading Republican fundraiser for the fourth quarter of the year. And since average donation sizes to the Ron Paul campaign are smaller, he outpaces all the other Republican candidates dramatically in terms of the actual number of people who have donated to his campaign.

And yet newspapers cover him only grudgingly. The recent news about Ron Paul raising more money in the first two months of the fourth quarter than Romney and Giuliani raised in the entire third quarter was utterly ignored by the every major local and national newspaper. These same newspapers run multiple stories every day detailing the latest statements from candidates like McCain, Thompson, and Huckabee, all of whom are similarly "long-shots" behind Giuliani and Romney and none of whom are experiencing anything like Ron Paul's momentum in fundraising and grassroots support.

The press says that it wants to focus on the issues, not the horserace. When it comes to the issues, one would think that Ron Paul would be a favorite topic in the press. He is the only Republican candidate who wants to bring the troops home to defend America in a country where 70% of the people are against the war. He is the only Republican candidate who backs up his claims to be fiscally conservative with a plan for actual spending cuts. And he is the only Republican candidate who voted against the Patriot Act in an era when many Americans are worried about government spying and torture. And interviewing Ron Paul is a journalist's dream-he will answer any question without the spin, caution, or evasion so common in the other candidates.

So why do newspapers ignore Ron Paul? There are many theories, ranging from bias to laziness to a desire to "call" the election in advance. It's hard to say.

But one thing is for sure. Ignoring Ron Paul is self-destructive for newspapers. Ron Paul has millions of supporters. They are young, high-income, politically involved, and Internet-savvy; exactly the types of readers newspapers should be courting in a time of declining and aging readership.

But these important news consumers are being told by the newspapers that their huge grassroots political campaign doesn't really exist. Every day that the newspapers ignore Ron Paul and his supporters and cover McCain, Thompson, and Huckabee instead, more of these news consumers lose faith in newspapers as reliable news sources. They defect from traditional newspapers and commit to getting their news elsewhere. By ignoring some of the most engaged and desirable media consumers out there, newspapers are alienating readers and hastening their own decline in relevance.