Our media, for the most part, have done a feeble job of most, if not all, of the above. The result has been a public who, seeing no options to a stale two-party system, are simply tuning out in increasing numbers from their own democracy. After the Nader campaign, I started doing some research, and I began to learn some things about the nature of the media beast. First, the broadcast airwaves are public property - they belong to you and me. Broadcasters own the equipment that they use to broadcast, and the buildings where their stations are located, but the public owns the airwaves, and broadcasters, no matter how wealthy or powerful, are allowed to use those airwaves as a privilege, not a right.
Wealthy broadcasters operate on our public airwaves completely rent-free .
And part of it may also have to do with lack of interest expressed in any specific third parties, because the public don't know about most of them - in fact cannot even name most of them. As the most relied-upon source of information, television broadcasters and the other major media generally then set the tone and scope of the political discussion in the smaller media outlets. But beyond this, one must consider that the mainstream media and their parent corporations are businesses , with a large business investment in the Democratic and Republican Parties. Given such a huge financial investment in the two major parties, it would seem quite a bad business decision for the media to stop exclusively promoting the stagnant two party system, and to open up our channels of information to true democracy. And certainly a continuation of the two party system has been quite beneficial to broadcasters, if not to the general public.