Running for president is a grueling process and is very often filled with hate and backlash. This new era of technology, along with reporters on TV and social media, is crucial to any campaign. These things have almost become more important in trying to persuade someone to vote for a candidate than actual speeches or traveling from state to state.

As 2019 comes to a close, there are multiple Democratic candidates such as Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren running for the 2020 presidential election. One candidate who seems to have come out of nowhere is Andrew Yang. Yang has done extremely well so far, especially considering this is his first time trying to run for any type of political position.

However, Yang might not get far in his journey due to one detrimental factor: misrepresentation by the media. Despite him being pretty high in the polls, media outlets seem to completely forget he exists when discussing the democratic debates.

Logically, the more a candidate speaks during the debates, the more people get to know them. In Yang’s case, he spoke the least in three out of the first four debates, and by far. If we take the second debate as an example, Democratic candidate and former vice-president Joe Biden received a whopping 21 minutes of speaking time. Where is Yang? Just go to the very bottom: he only received approximately 9 minutes of time. The moderators should definitely look at the data and realize that there is something wrong, and try giving Yang a little more time to present his ideas and respond to questions.

Twitter user and Yang supporter Scott Santens has a Twitter thread that goes on and on showing the countless times the media forgot Yang. For example, despite scoring pretty high on the polls, news outlets such as MSNBC and CNN just choose to ignore Yang. A past poll showing the top democratic nominees shows six different people, with the lowest being Beto O’Rourke at one percent. They seem to completely fail to remember that Yang was at three percent at the time, and should have been on the screen instead of O’Rourke.

Some other incidences are extremely comical. The first one is by NBC, where Yang is shown crowd surfing. But NBC got one crucial thing wrong: his name. In the bottom margin, they referred to him as John rather than Andrew Yang. Two seconds of research could have easily given Yang publicity and made NBC look better. Another entertaining example is when Yang was invited to MSNBC to talk about the El Paso shooting. He quickly got cut off mid-sentence during his interview, only to then show a clip of Bernie Sanders, one of his opponents, giving a speech. They should be equally respected as candidates, and MSNBC should not be favoring candidates this heavily, if at all.

Hopefully, Yang’s story makes news outlets change to be less biased and not unfairly control the elections because for now, they are doing a substandard job. Candidates need to be represented fairly or else the media should not be allowed to cover politics and let the politicians speak for themselves.