Stewart has a point.

And although I don't agree with Ron Paul on everything (what with him being for small government and me for big) I have to admit he's probably the only major candidate who is completely genuine from either party for quite some time.

Reference my earlier post Ron Paul is anti Corporatist. The media is owned by these Corporations. The debate cannot go past a certain spectrum of opinion. Power is highly concentrated and unless it's shifted more democratically nothing will change and you'll never get a Ron Paul in the White House.

I doubt very much that Chris Wallace is stooging for Rick Santorum, and I have even stronger doubts that Martin Bashir is trying to protect Michele Bachmann. I think it's to some extent because they live in a bubble, and the conventional wisdom says it's Perry, Romney, and Bachmann, so that's all you'll get out of them. To be fair, Paul is pretty consistently in the middle of the pack in national polls, so why should they going to act like he's a real comer just because he won the meaningless Ames Straw Poll? It does look a bit strange when Bashir skips over his name in the Gallup poll like that, at least when its taken out of context. But it's not really remarkable in that instance Paul is in third. It's more remarkable that Perry coming in sapped so much of Bachmann's support like that, which may have been the point Bashir was trying to make.

If there is an antipathy to Paul among the media, that should really be no surprise because the Tea Party has been an object of derision from a lot of these same people. Whereas the strategy was to discredit the Tea Party as racist, the best thing to do with a guy who is running for president is to ignore him as much as possible. But I don't really believe in conspiracy theories, so I doubt it's calculated. What tends to happen in media outfits is rather a kind of groupthink. So instead of conspiring to shut him out, they're all on the same wavelength that says he's not a serious candidate and can't win with his craaaaazy ideas, so why waste time talking about the right wing version of Ralph Nader even if he's pulling respectable poll numbers right now? In that regard Paul is kind of the anti-Huntsman, whom the media gives a vastly disproportionate amount of coverage just because they dig him for being the least Republican Republican in the field despite the fact that he usually polls at 1% or lower.