By CYDNEY GILLIS
Staff Reporter

Aaron Dixon wasn’t in jail very long, but it was long enough for the Green Party candidate to make his point: Money decides all things in elections, even who gets to speak in a TV debate put on in the public’s interest.

Dixon, last year’s anti-war challenger to Sen. Maria Cantwell, got arrested Oct. 17 after going to the Seattle studios of KING-5 and demanding a podium beside Cantwell, Republican Mike McGavick, and Libertarian candidate Bruce Guthrie, who had already made the same point in a different way.

One of KING’s criteria for the type of “serious” candidate it would allow into the debate was whether the person had raised $1.2 million, an amount then equal to 10 percent of the last Senate winner’s war chest. To secure his spot in the debate, Guthrie and his wife had mortgaged their Bellingham home.

Such is the minor-party candidate’s quest for free speech – a misadventure that the two men, along with former third-party nominees Ruth Bennett and Gentry Lange, plan to share at a Jan. 27 forum that will examine KING-5's debate policies and their narrowing effect on elections.

The focus is on KING because it’s the only local station to air debates, says organizer and Progressive Party member Linde Knighton, but, so far, the station has not answered an invitation to participate.

In a lawsuit brought by Libertarian Ruth Bennett, who had her own brush-off at the KING-5 door in the last governor’s race, the station’s attorneys explain KING’s position.

“Including all candidates, including nonviable ones, in the debates,” the lawyers wrote, “would reduce both the number of questions that could be asked of each candidate, and the amount of time that viable candidates would have to answer.” As a result, the station believes that “the public interest is best served by not including nonviable candidates.”

Knighton and the others say it’s a policy that fails voters. No one wants to give air time to perennial candidates like Mike the Mover, they say, but excluding legitimate third-party candidates based on money or polling percentages keeps voters from hearing new ideas or different points of view.

Dixon’s stand against the Iraq War, for instance, helped put a spotlight on Cantwell and her vote for it. After trying to negotiate a spot in the debate, he says he went down to the studios with a group of supporters and managed to slip in the station’s locked doors as someone was walking out. That started a standoff in the lobby.

Eventually, he says, “The police came and said they’d have to arrest me. I said, ‘Go ahead. I’m not leaving. I want to be in this debate.’”

Police removed Dixon from the premises in handcuffs and held him 45 minutes, but did not charge him. News of the incident “really sparked a huge outcry from a lot of people,” he says. “They were taken aback that KING had a requirement that you had to have a million dollars in your campaign.”

In an e-mail, producer Michael Cate provided KING’s five-point debate criteria, which includes having a pot of money, or a scientific poll that shows the candidate will get 10 percent of the vote, or, the candidate’s party must have drawn 10 percent of the vote in the previous governor’s race. Any one of those would qualify a candidate for debate.

Bennett says it was her lawsuit that forced the station to publicly state these rules, which are based on the Debate Policy Standards of the Pew Charitable Trust. But they’re meaningless, says Gentry Lange, a 2005 Green candidate for King County executive, because KING doesn’t include the names of independent or third-party candidates in its own polling.

That, he says, excludes minor-party candidates from the get-go. They could pay for their own polls, of course, but that comes back to money.

“KING-5 points to those rules, but they don’t even follow those rules,” Lange says. “I’m particularly annoyed at that.”