If An Election Fell in the Forest, Would Anybody Notice?

The headlines about my Congressman, Charles Rangel, continue unabated. Certainly you cannot blame the dailies or the TV networks for noticing the alleged ethics violations, an 80-year-old legislative battler who refuses at this hour to give up the fight. He’s gone from being an inspiring figure to some of us…to an embarrassment. Sure looks like it’s time to give it up, Rep. Rangel. Thanks for proving the lesson of George Orwell’s “1984” all over again: Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
An entertaining and newsy lesson. But I wish that more attention would be paid to the electoral contest in Rangel’s district. A few years ago in another election season I interviewed Joyce Johnson. Now she’s among the candidates running against Rangel in the September Democratic primary. She’s barely mentioned, as are the others who want the job. They are not given much of a chance against Rangel, and Assemblyman Adam Clayton Powell IV gets most of the ink when anybody does get around to writing about the actual primary.
Actually, it seems from here like nobody’s writing about the primaries at all. The New York Times has not even gotten around to many of its one-shot pieces about various metropolitan area elections. I live in a district where there are contested Congressional and state Senate primaries, but the only signs of that are, well, the signs with the contenders' photos. Or bumping into the people on the street, which is how I found out the Anna Lewis is running for state Senate in the district that for so long has been the province of Eric Schneiderman, who is now running for state attorney general. See, we've got races.
Alas, we do not have much coverage of them. Maybe our radio stations are doing a fantastic job and I’m just missing it. But I doubt it. I’m pretty much the last person to media-bash, but the outlets that make fun of voters for not turning out to the polls should at least, in the weeks before voting, present the notion that there’s an election. Otherwise, we’re all just helping our Members of Congress and other politicos win re-election without anything resembling a contest. That’s a journalistic ethics violation.