Editor’s note: This letter is in response to the “2012 Election Voter Guide,” published in Wednesday’s Daily Lobo, part one of a weekly series of election coverage. This installment covered New Mexico’s candidates for the U.S. Senate and New Mexico District 1 of the U.S. House of Representatives. To clarify, the piece on Wednesday covered candidates who are on the ballot. Bob Anderson and Jeanne Pahls, who were featured in the Sept. 17 photo column “Congressional Couple,” will be covered separately.
Editor,
How lovely that the Daily Lobo quotes Thomas Jefferson on informing the public in their 2012 Election Voter Guide. Too bad they go on to ignore him by not including the official write-in candidates, Bob Anderson for U.S. Senate and Jeanne Pahls for U.S. House, District 1.
It should be no secret to any media in Albuquerque that we the people have the choice of write-in candidates this election, as they have to register with the Bernalillo County Clerk’s office, and Anderson and Pahls are listed online on The League of Women Voters 2012 Election Guide.
KOB, KRQE, KOAT and KUNM, all sponsors of local candidate debates, are ignoring their mandate of licensure, free speech and informing the public they supposedly serve by deliberately not including Anderson and Pahls in their broadcast debates. Stuart Dyson of KOB explained, via email, that KOB chooses to only include candidates on the written ballot.
Of course it would be naive to think that KOB, an NBC affiliate whose parent company is General Electric, arguably the largest military contractor in the United States, gives a damn about presenting a view to the electorate that isn’t in goose step with either of the two corporate U.S. Senate candidates and their records in blind service of the war machine. It’s disappointing to see that a student newspaper, at a supposed institution of higher learning, is now in competition with local “professional” media in supplying disinformation to the public.
Ernest W. Sturdevant
Daily Lobo reader
