I am a candidate for Congress. I submitted a duly qualified petition in 2012 to appear on the ballot. I received enough votes in 2012 to duly qualify my party, the Libertarian Party, to appear on the ballot. Along with my Green Party colleague, Bill Clyde, we, according to the laws of the State of Connecticut, are legal candidates and valid choices on the ballot this November. So are the incumbent, Democrat Joe Courtney, and Republican Lori Hopkins-Cavanagh.

The difference between Democrat/Republican and everyone else is simple. The Day, along with other media establishments, usually doesn't poll anything else. When they do, in the rare cases they do, it's targeted to see who will "spoil" the election for someone else - as if Democrats and Republicans do not have to earn their votes. My thesis, which The Day has proven, is that most media simply believe that Republicans and Democrats, no matter how unpopular, are simply entitled to coverage, no matter how low Congress' approval rating gets, no matter what the results produced by incumbents, and in the case of The Day, no matter what that publication itself says.

According to the criteria, at least as I had received it, not even Lori Hopkins-Cavanagh had qualified to be admitted to The Day's debate at the Garde. Indeed, given The Day's own scathing comments, many of which I happen to agree with, it is clear that The Day's position itself is that she will not have a serious effect on the race. But if that conclusion is applied to myself and Clyde just the same - candidates who truly have to earn votes - why did The Day join CPTV and NPR in hosting a debate at all on Oct. 14?

To be blunt, only one congressional debate occurred that night - outside the walls of the Garde Arts Center. Inside, Courtney gave a synopsis of cashflow that left the district, including the fraction that came back to it. Hopkins-Cavanagh, when not woefully misinformed and hopelessly generic, said nothing of substance. Myself and Clyde had a constructive dialogue on where our overall foreign, education and energy policies were headed. We talked specifics on how to address the cost of college education and a meaningful approach to the foreclosure crisis. Voters want to know. Yet The Day, NPR, CPTV and most media outlets are simply puzzled as to why the majority of voters don't show up.

The benefactor who made The Day a reality once said, "The newspaper should be more than a business enterprise. It should also be the champion and protector of the public interest and defender of the people's rights." The abject failure of most media to engage in that due diligence is why most people don't vote.

The editorial page editor of The Day wrote, "In this case, we did not invite the third-party candidates - Libertarian Daniel Reale and Green William C. Clyde - opening us up to charges of inconsistency." That's true for a variety of reasons. To recap: (1) The Day's position is that none of Courtney's challengers will have a meaningful impact - yet it invited one of three only; and (2) failure to poll and failure to cover from the onset create a self-fulfilling prophecy to disqualify candidates of other parties from the debates.

If any media outlet wishes to pretend to have some altruistic mission of complete fairness, truth and dissemination, then it need not wonder why most voters fail to stand and be counted in polls or at the voting booth in November.

Dan Reale is the Libertarian candidate for Congress in the 2nd Congressional District.