From a friend’s email I learned that Carol Miller, the independent candidate for Congress in New Mexico’s Third Congressional District, had been excluded from a KOB-TV Channel 4 debate. It aired Oct. 25 with only the major party candidates.

That was news to me, so I made some inquiries. What followed was an education in politics and news mediums. Come with me….

First, some background: in 1997, the mostly northern Third, heavily Democratic, sent a right-wing Republican, Bill Redmond, to the Congress rather than Democrat Eric Serna; Green Party candidate Carol Miller earned 17 percent of the vote.

Miller is running again, this time as an independent, against Democrat Ben Ray Lujan and Republican Dan East. This, I figured, was a no-brainer for our local TV stations, an opportunity to air not white bread two-way debates but spicy three-way confrontations.

I figured wrong.

Turns out that KOAT-TV Channel 7 scheduled an Oct. 19 debate with just the major party candidates. When Miller protested, KOAT relented and she participated therein.

KOB-TV Channel 4 -– made of stronger stuff, I guess -– definitively rebuffed her. KRQE-TV Channel 13 planned no debate.

On the phone, Miller told me KOB-TV clearly, intentionally refused to let her join the hour-long program. Confusing, she said, because she saw stories on the KOB web site about this year’s upsurge in independent candidacies and women’s candidacies and also a report that she’s currently polling in the double digits. And, she said, there are more registered independents than Republicans in Santa Fe County.

I was confused, too. As a TV news director umpteen years ago, I found news folk open, inclusive, not narrow. Also, because they’re in show biz, TV news directors appreciate unscripted drama.

Finally, wouldn’t three candidates better serve the public interest? So I called Jamie Ioos (pronounce the “I” as a “y” to rhyme with the Spanish “dos”), Channel 4’s news director, about her decision. She said she would email me the station’s position statement. I said I knew the gist, just wanted to pose a question or two.

“That (the station statement) is as much as you’re going to get from me,” she said. I thanked her. As Kate Nash reported in the Santa Fe New Mexican, Oct. 24, station management said, “In the past 20 years, KOB-TV has not included independents in our debates because they are not members of an affiliated political party.”

FYI, I wanted to ask Ioos what would be wrong with including an independent. Also, if she — as a journalist — didn’t prefer a triangular argument.  Oh, well.

Wait. Wasn’t this an “equal time” situation? On the FCC’s web site, Section 315 of the Communications Act, paragraph 73.1941 says that if a station puts one candidate on the air it “shall afford equal opportunities to all other candidates for that office to use such facilities.” It lists exceptions, though — appearances in a newscast, news interview, documentary (where the candidate’s appearance is incidental) or on-the-spot coverage of events like conventions.

Perhaps KOB-TV classifies the CD3 debate as a news event. If so, too bad for Miller, for as Andrew Jay Schwartzman of the Media Access Project (www.mediaaccess.org) told me in an e-mail, “The courts have repeatedly held that debates are exempt from Section 315 as ‘on the spot coverage of a bona fide news event.’”

Great, “the courts” have thus neutered the “equal time” requirement. But KOB-TV can legally exclude Carol Miller from the debate. Thus concluded my education. Like all good teaching it raised new questions.

Does portraying a three-way race as a two-way serve the public’s interest? Is it fair to the absent candidate? The electorate?

No, no and no.

P.S. A note on press coverage: With the exception of Kate Nash’s praiseworthy work in the Santa Fe New Mexican and an informative story by Raam Wong for the Journal North, I’ve seen nothing on Miller vs. KOB-TV. Used to be that daily newspapers routinely watchdogged TV news. They should restore that beat.