Thursday, July 05, 2007

Grinding the news into Gravel

The Advocate has run a puff piece on Mike Gravel.

Just who is Mike Gravel? You'd be hard-pressed to know the answer without reading the article. Yours truly had never heard of him until stumbling across the linked article.

He's apparently a little-known candidate for the Democratic nomination for president of the USA. His claim to fame is a minute-long YouTube film of him skipping rocks across a pond and a cameo on the Daily Show.

His campaign, so far, has raised only about $100,000 -- or less than 10% of the typical budget for the Libertarian presidential campaign in a bad fundraising year.

So of course, the queer Democratic-leaning media gives him plenty of attention -- including pats on the back for positions that aren't any more pro-gay than those espoused by the frontrunners for the Libertarian nomination (as polled by Outright Libertarians).

Then, a year after Mr. Gravel is forgotten -- when the Libertarian candidate is chosen, has $2 million to spend on a campaign, and espouses unapologetically pro-gay positions on the issues -- much of the queer press will inevitably decline to provide any proportional coverage of the Libertarian campaign. . . let alone meaningful coverage.

The war drums will beat for Hillary, Obama, or whoever bears the Democrats' brass ring, regardless of their substantive position on LGBTQ issues.

And the most ironic part of the whole thing is that huge swaths of the queer press will inevitably cite "a lack of campaign funds" as a reason not to cover the national candidates who aren't Demopublicans or Republicrats. Just 12 months after publishing a glowing report of a Democrat with less than 10% of the funding power, who supposedly merits coverage because "with little chance of winning, he can say almost anything, which should make for a deadly combination."

Meanwhile, our candidate won't be saying "almost anything" -- (s)he'll be saying something.