An article in Monday’s Daily had the headline “Without Hot Political Issue, Student Voter Turnout is Low.”

Actually there is a “hot” political issue, but the media stopped covering that issue over six months ago.

For a short while around March and April of this year, news outlets were doing a lot of big stories about “downsizing” — the widespread firing of workers by companies eager to boost profits. But soon corporate greed issues faded with Pat Buchanan’s presidential campaign.

While I’m in complete disagreement with Buchanan on a host of issues, including his bigotry toward minorities, immigrants, and gays — at least he raised the issue of corporate greed.

With Buchanan out of the picture, mistreatment of workers is off the media radar screen.

While Clinton and Dole differ on details of economic policy, their campaigns are of course paid for by corporate and wealthy interests so they don’t raise the issue.

The media role in this is discouraging. The mass media generally serves as a conveyor belt for elite opinions.

If people in positions of power raise issues, they might get covered. But the media often marginalizes the opinions of large sectors of the population.

For example, in the mid-1980s, opinion polls showed that 75 percent of the American public supported a nuclear freeze.

The Soviet Union and just about every other country in the world supported a nuclear freeze as well. But because the U.S. government opposed it, it wasn’t even an issue to be raised in campaigns.

For years, polls have shown that a majority of the U.S. public favors a Canadian-style health care system in which the government acts as the sole insurer and offers universal coverage to all Americans.

However, the media gave little attention to the single-payer plan when health care was a national debate.

Media managers justified this imbalance by saying that the single payer is not “politically viable.”

In other words, news judgment is based on elite preferences, not popular opinion. This has terrifying consequences in a democracy worthy of the name.

In a May 5, 1993, discussion of managed competition on the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, Robert MacNeil led a panel of a congressman, a governor and a state health commissioner, who were mainly supportive of managed competition, and a representative of Physicians for a National Health Care Plan, Dr. Steffie Woolhandler.

Woolhandler argued that managed competition would increase costs and bureaucracy, while the other three guests disagreed. MacNeil, acting as if the panel were a random sample of opinion, then said, “Dr. Woolhandler, that’s three against one on the cost reduction thing.”

Near the end of the discussion, Macneil said he was asking the last question of Woolhandler “since you’re in the minority.”

She replied: “Robert, I’m not in the minority. Polls are showing two-thirds of the American people support governmental-funded national health insurance.”

And today, despite deep efforts by the ideological system (which includes this university) to push the view that we live in a pluralistic society in which government operates primarily in the interests of the people, about half the population in polls say that the government works for the interests of major sectors of business.

In a recent poll commissioned by the Preamble Center, 69 percent of registered voters “favor government action to promote more responsible corporate behavior and penalize bad corporate behavior.”

Fifty-four percent see downsizing as a problem “serious enough to warrant direct government intervention.”

The supremacy of global corporations over out political, economic, educational, media, and cultural institutions should be the biggest issue in American politics.

I’m not anti-corporate, I’m anti-exploitation.

I don’t believe power and wealth should be concentrated in so few hands as it is today-the wealth of 90 percent of the people at the bottom is equal to the 2 percent at the top, for example.

The resistance of concentrated power is called democracy. One of its purposes is to strengthen people’s usable tools of democracy, the other, in Thomas Jefferson’s words, is to “curb the excesses of the monied interests.”

I suggest reading Multinational Monitor in the library if you’d like examples of these excesses.

Also, look at the Wall Street Journal.

They regularly report on the corporate crime epidemic sweeping the country. Bribes, payoffs, price-fixing, violations of occupational safety, you name it and they do it.

One of the few candidates who is raising the issues of corporate power and how we can give more tools for democracy to workers, voter-citizens, taxpayers, shareholders, and consumers is Ralph Nader.

The main purpose of Nader’s campaign is to broaden the agenda in terms of what kinds of issues get talked about in city politics, state politics, and national politics.

Another purpose is to bring into politics a young generation of Americans who are getting increasingly turned off by tweedle-dee, tweedle-dum, demopublicans and republicrats.

These two parties are increasingly becoming a political hermaphrodite, the same face with different makeup when it comes to addressing fundamental issues of power.

Nader spoke to 1,800 people in Portland, Oregon last Saturday, a large percentage of those in attendance were in their 20s.

They responded with a loud round of applause when Ralph said, “For some of the young people here, I know it is not fashionable in your circles to be involved in politics.

“But history shows that when young people don’t turn on to politics, politics turns on young people.”

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Andrew Chebuhar is a senior in journalism and mass communication from Muscatine.