I'm watching CNN's coverage of the Iowa Caucus, and I'm just amazed at the how blatantly they're ignoring Ron Paul entirely. I have always considered the bias against him to be the result of his low numbers, but as I'm watching this I can only conclude that they just don't want him getting attention. Let me explain.

On the screen they have these pie charts showing the percentage of votes for each candidate. The pie chart shows 35% Huckabee, 24% Romney, 14% Thompson, 12% McCain, and then a big gray slice that's not labeled. Add those up. That's 85%, which leaves 15% unaccounted for. You would expect this perhaps if that 15% was very evenly split among many candidates. So I looked at CNN.com for the full results. Here's the shocker: Ron Paul has 11%. Look again at the numbers above. Ron Paul is only 1% behind McCain, who shows prominently in the pie chart on national TV. Giuliani has 4%, and no other candidate shows anything.

Then I look at the Democrat pie chart on TV. It shows 4 or 5 candidates called out, and then a tiny gray area for about 2%. There is no giant gray area with no name. No hidden candidate with real support (except maybe Biden, who has 1%).

This is a striking difference. On the one side we have an evenly split race among Democrats, in which the top 5 are called out by name. Then on the Republican side we have a conspicuously large (15%) gray area which is really mostly Ron Paul, who is not mentioned at all.

Ron Paul's name should be on that screen. Why isn't it? Can anyone really deny that the media is burying Ron Paul? The biggest challenger to his campaign is not running for president. His biggest challenger is trying to run the election by pretending he doesn't exist.

Edit: I added some pictures so you can see what I'm talking about. Sorry for the blurriness. I took the screenshots with my Slingbox.