During Green Party Presidential candidate Jill Stein’s bid for the White House in both this election and back in 2012, the Big Three TV Networks (along with the rest of the mainstream media) consistently ignored her presidential campaign, barely even acknowledging her candidacy at all, let alone any platform or policy. However, since Ms. Stein began her election recount campaign last Wednesday, the same Big Three TV networks that refused to report on her while she was running for president are suddenly showering her with the much-needed publicity that could have critically boosted her campaign back then.
Indeed, the Big Three have bestowed to her TWELVE TIMES more coverage in the last five days alone than they did over the entirety of her nearly two-year run for the White House.
The Big Three television networks are the three major traditional commercial broadcast television networks that have dominated television in the United States since the 50’s: ABC, CBS and NBC. To many American TV audiences who can’t afford cable, these 3 major stations are their primary source for news and analysis on current events.
A survey of coverage given to Ms. Stein’s Green Party 2016 Presidential run found that ABC, CBS, and NBC gave Stein’s campaign a scant 36 seconds of coverage combined across all three networks during the entire length of her campaign. But since announcing her recount effort late last week, the Big 3 have suddenly granted Stein a full seven minutes and 26 seconds of coverage, according to the Media Research Center.
Stein jumped to her recount campaign the day before the Thanksgiving holiday, quickly meeting her initial $4 million fundraising goal in a matter of mere hours to cover the costs of recounts in 3 states where the final vote count for the two lead candidates was particularly close — Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. It is expected that recounts will cost around a couple million dollars in each state, a staggering amount of money for an independent candidate or a small 3rd party to somehow materialize, along with endless bureaucratic red tape, mountains of paperwork, and tedious procedures, usually rushing to meet a deadline of several days in order to have the recount request submitted to the courts before the election is certified. And all of this effort is necessary merely just to check and verify the integrity of the vote count – something that should automatically occur in the form of regular audits anyway to provide an extra safeguard against election fraud.
Since she began the recount effort, Stein has stated an interest in expanding the campaign to even more states that still had open deadlines for the recount submissions, especially the states that were narrowly won by a small margin. After raising over $5 million towards recount efforts, she formally filed her recount petition in Wisconsin, which was accepted by Wisconsin’s state election board, provided she comes up with the cost up front. The Hillary Clinton campaign decided to join in on the recount once it was made official in Wisconsin. Stein has also officially filed in Michigan. However, as a recount in Pennsylvania requires a report of election fraud having taken place, (which one would not be able to prove without a full audit and recount, making it a ridiculous catch-22), Stein would have to take the recount petition to court and get an order for a recount from a judge, which is an extremely unlikely scenario. With Pennsylvania no longer a viable recount state, the number of electoral college votes that could shift from Wisconsin and Michigan would not be enough to give Hillary the lead over Trump or change the final outcome of the election.
As of the end of November, Hillary Clinton is still the winner of the popular vote, maintaining a steadily increasing lead in excess of 2.5 million votes over Trump.