Row After Columnist's Article On Stolen 2004 Election

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Row After Columnist's Article On Stolen 2004 Election

 

Mainstream Journo Penning Election Reform Column

Has Article Rejected for First Time in Career!

5-7-5

 

What began innocently enough with a watershed article several weeks

ago by Tribune Media Service's Robert Koehler on the need for Election

Reform and an investigation into the results of Election 2004, has now

erupted into a full-fledged firestorm resulting Wednesday afternoon in

the unprecedented rejection of Koehler's latest column by the

higher-ups at TMS where Koehler is both a columnist and editor!

 

Tribune Media Services is the syndication arm of the Tribune Company

which, in turn, is the parent company to the Chicago Tribune.

Koehler's original ground-breaking column from April -- the first by

an American Mainstream Media journalist that we know of to out-and-out

charge that the 2004 Election was stolen -- was written a few days

after Koehler attended the National Election Reform Conference last

month in Nashville.

 

The piece was headlined " The Silent Scream of

Numbers: The 2004 election was stolen - will someone please tell the

media? "

 

He followed it up the next week with another stunner

headlined " Democracy's Abu Ghraib - If they can disable an election,

what's coming next? "

 

While both pieces were distributed via TMS to

syndicate member newspapers, only a handful chose to run either of

those two columns. Most notably, however, despite Chicago Tribune

itself having chosen to run neither column, their " Public Editor " , Don

Wycliffe, found it appropriate to write a column in the Trib's pages

wherein he rebutted Koehler's original piece. Wycliff's rebuttal, as

reported here previously, attempted to discredit Koehler's column,

Koehler himself, and those of us who might give a damn about democracy

and the responsibility that the people (and yes, that would include

the media) have to remain vigilant in order to sustain it.

 

Wycliff's column, citing the " moral example " of Richard Nixon (yes, not kidding)

as the figure whom American's ought to follow in regards to potentially stolen

elections, has erupted in a torrent of email

directed towards the misguided and/or misinformed Wycliff and in

support of Koehler. Koehler once again hits a home-run with this

week's column in response to Wycliff's. Or at least he would have had

the Masters of Tribune Media Services not killed the article for the

first time in Koehler's career!...

 

Here's the spiked column, received from Koehler via email, not yet

posted on his website, Common Wonders

 

For release 5/5/05 CITIZENS IN THE RAIN By Robert C. KoehlerTribune

Media Services

 

 

" Where there is a free press the governors must live in constant awe

of the opinions of the governed. " - Lord Macaulay (one of many

stirring quotes on the sacred role of the Fourth Estate adorning the

lobby of the Chicago Tribune)

 

My fantasy of the mainstream media

actually doing their job, and living up to the words they carve in

marble to describe their own importance, is an 80-point (Terri

Schiavo- or even Pope John Paul II-sized) headline running across the

top of tomorrow's paper: ELECTION RESULTS IN DOUBT. That would stop

a few hearts. But the nation's major newspapers, even as they struggle

with declining readership, have no intention of being quite that

relevant to their readers - no intention, it appears, even to begin

the process of looking into the hornets' nest of vote fraud

allegations abuzz in meticulously researched reports on electronic

voting (see uscountvotes.org) or the voluminous Conyers Report on what

happened in Ohio on Nov. 2 (see truthout.org/Conyersreport.pdf).

 

Isn't our democracy at stake? Doesn't that matter? " If John Kerry

and the Ohio Democratic Party and all the other folks who had the most

to gain from the election were making this challenge, I would get

interested. But when the people with the most at stake don't step up,

I'm suspicious. "

 

So Don Wycliff, the Chicago Tribune's public

editor, wrote to me in an e-mail exchange a few days ago, explaining

why he, if not the Tribune itself, had no intention of investigating

the issue with any seriousness.

 

It followed a strange breach in the

Tribune's deathly silence on the irregularities of the 2000 and 2004

elections, which came about after readers began bombarding the Tribune

with mail suggesting they run a column I had written, " The Silent

Scream of Numbers, " addressing these irregularities and reporting on a

national election-reform conference in Nashville last month.

 

My column didn't run, but Wycliff wrote a column, " When Winning Isn't

Everything, " dismissing their concerns and telling them to ponder the

moral leadership of Richard Nixon, who patriotically swallowed his

close defeat in 1960 without complaint. In others words, shut up and

get over it. Wycliff was speaking only for himself, not " the media, "

but because his column was one of the few pieces to appear in a major

publication even acknowledging that a huge number of Americans are

distraught at mounting evidence of large-scale disenfranchisement in

2004 (and no guarantee that 2006 and 2008 will be any different), his

words, by default, have special resonance.

 

They stand in for the

prejudices of the media as a whole. Of all my objections to what he

wrote, his contention that Kerry has the most at stake in all this is

the most dispiriting, and most reflects the wrongheaded, " horse race "

coverage of elections the media have shoved down our throats for as

long as I can remember.

 

In his column, Wycliff even used a sports

analogy, pointing out that " it's not the pregame prognostication and

expert opinions that count, but the numbers on the scoreboard after

the contest has actually been played. " The Bush team won; the Kerry

team lost. And the voters must be the equivalent of sports fans then,

either jubilant or disappointed when the game is over, but couch

potatoes either way, not participants.

 

Anyone else just a little bit

offended? As one of the hundred or so readers who responded to the

column (and cc'd me) put it, " Winning isn't everything, but fair

elections are everything. " Nearly a week after Wycliff's column ran,

the Tribune has printed only one letter in response to it - and this

letter was about Nixon.

 

It didn't have a word to say about the 2004

election. So much for my naïve optimism that an actual debate would

ensue on the pages of the Trib. Once again I quote exit-poll analyst

Jonathan Simon: " When the autopsy of our democracy is performed, it is

my belief that media silence will be given as the primary cause of

death. "

 

The stakes are getting higher and higher. Could it be we

can't have election reform without media reform? The " respectable

press " refuses to confer the least legitimacy on the citizens who are

questioning this election and demanding accountability in the voting

process. How do we make them care? How do we make them look for

themselves? How do we make them stand outside with us in the rain,

waiting to cast our ballot for democracy?

 

Robert Koehler, an

award-winning, Chicago-based journalist, is an editor at Tribune Media

Services and nationally syndicated writer. You can respond to this

column at bkoehler or visit his Web site at commonwonders.com.

 

 

 

 

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