The national conventions for the Democratic and Republican parties may still be more than a year away, but the news media would have us believe that the nominees have already been selected. Pundit after pundit and columnist after columnist have declared that the 2016 Presidential election will be a titanic battle between two of America’s wealthiest and most powerful families, the Bushes and the Clintons.

In a column in Politico Magazine last week, columnist Bill Scher argued that the nominations are a foregone conclusion. In his essay, titled Newsflash: It’s Going To Be Hillary vs. Jeb; Can we all stop pretending that there’s any real suspense in this presidential race?, Scher maintains that it is a waste of time for Americans to even pay attention to any of the other candidates for nomination:

“I am going to tell you, right now, what the political landscape of the future looks like so you don’t waste your time over the next year listening to a parade of pundits or watching those ridiculous primary debates. The 2016 election is going to come down to Hillary vs. Jeb, of course. Dynasty against dynasty. [...] Couldn’t we find anyone else? We could! We will choose not to. We want it this way: a bona fide heavyweight bout. Two veterans who need to prove they can strike out on their own. […] We all know how this show is going to end. Anyone who says they don’t is just fooling themselves.”

Scher isn’t alone. From columnists for all the major newspapers including the New York Times and Washington Post, to the talking heads on Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, and the major networks, the media has been insisting for months that the only candidates we need to pay attention to are Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton, that their nominations to be the major parties’ candidates are all but inevitable.

However, despite the assurances of the news media, the nominations of Bush and Clinton are anything but certain. In fact, it seems that Americans are not interested in nominating either of these candidates, let alone electing them. They are actually increasingly unpopular among American voters – fewer than half of Americans polled view Clinton favourably, and Bush is the least liked of the Republican frontrunners, aside from the much-ridiculed Donald Trump.

If Americans don’t like these candidates, why are the media continuing to insist that these will be our nominees in 2016? Both Bush’s and Clinton’s popularity is dropping with every passing week, and there is over a year until their parties’ conventions where the nominees for president will be selected. If things continue at this rate, Bush and Clinton may well be the least popular politicians in America by 2016.

The reason that the media is still promoting these candidates as the inevitable nominees is that they simply do not care about the opinions of regular Americans. Their corporate masters have decreed that these are the two candidates they would like to see running for president in 2016, and so the news media will simply not allow any discussion of other candidates as serious threats to the Chosen Ones.

This may well become a self-fulfilling prophecy; if the media keeps repeating the names of Bush and Clinton as the only possible candidates for long enough, then it is likely that these are the names that will finally be selected next year. However, this demonstrates the disdain that the media and corporate elites feel for America and for all American citizens.

We do not need to bow down to the wishes of these elites who would be our masters. We are free to make our own choices, and Americans have already decided they do not want Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush to be sitting in White House until the 2020 elections. If the Democratic and Republican parties won’t give us nominees we can feel good about voting for, we will need to look for independent candidates.