MEDIA PAYS SCANT ATTENTION TO VOTING PROBLEMS- Without free, fair elections, no

[Guest guest]

" Arlene Montemarano " <mikarl

Thu, 25 May 2006 21:57:54 -0400

MEDIA PAYS SCANT ATTENTION TO VOTING PROBLEMS- " Without free,

fair elections, nothing else matters "

 

 

 

 

 

Published on Friday, May 19, 2006 by CommonDreams.org

 

Why is the Media Downplaying Our Voting Scandal?

by Danny Schechter

 

Explain this to me. Why do so few of our TV " journalists " and

political reporters seem interested in all the questions that have

been raised about the integrity of our voting system?

 

Voting is at the heart of our democracy. Billions of dollars are spent

on political campaigns and tens of millions on covering them. All the

networks have election units complete with pollsters, analysts and

experts up the kazoo. All of them sound authoritative and spice their

commentary with personal war stories and a parade of insider anecdotes.

 

Just tune in any election night and you have to marvel at all the

space age technology, fancy graphics and computer assisted

projections. The anchors seem to know as much about the history of

voting percentages in each Congressional district as fanatical

baseball fans recall earned run averages and the speed of each pitch.

 

If there are ten military men and women backing up each soldier in the

field, there are tens of political aides, advisors, interns and

hangers on " supporting " our elected politicians, or is it

poli-trikians?. Handicapping elections is one of their specialties and

they know most of the races and players by heart.

 

Compared to corporate machinations, or even military-industrial

decisions, politics is over-covered, And yet the actual process of

voting—the machines, the counting, the verification, and the questions

raised by well informed journalists and analysts about voting fraud

seem to bore the punditocracy.

 

I know because I made a film, Counting on Democracy about what

actually happened in Florida in what is still of the most

controversial elections in our history, with the popular votes won by

Gore and the election won by Bush. 175,000 votes went uncounted. Once

it was decided that the GOP won, most of the media lost interest. Very

few journalists looked into what the ACLU called " the tyranny of small

decisions " that affected the vote.

 

A media review of the outcome was postponed for months and came to

convoluted conclusions although the New York Times reporter who led it

told me they found that Gore won. That's not what his own newspaper

reported in a story that was so dense that it was hard to understand

what it was saying. It was one of those pieces where the headline said

one thing, the text something else.

 

Every one agreed that the election process was broken but there was

little media attention paid to how to fix it. Once fancy new

electronic voting machines appeared on the scene, many journalists

seemed to promulgate the idea of " crisis over " because, in their

worldwiew, technology solves all problems. Perhaps, that's because so

many of them think hey are tech savvy and rely on computers every day.

Yet concerns about a paper trail and verification are shunted aside as

issues taken seriously only by the grumpy or conspiratorial among us.

Fast Forward to 2004. I was covering the Democratic Convention in

Boston. So was Michael Moore and Greg Palast and others who were

concerned that the 2004 election could become a repeat of 2000. I

attended a breakfast at the Florida delegation which assured me that

their problems most decidedly had not been fixed. Palast who studied

the way felons and others were disenfranchised in 2000 warned that

those forces who want to fix our elections were more sophisticated

than ever. Everyone expressed concerns that Ohio could turn into the

Florida of 2004. Oddly, the Democratic Party and its candidate didn't

take the concerns seriously, or prepare for the predicted

eventualities. It was business as usual.

 

We filmed the concerns being expressed in Boston with no response, and

then for " balance " went to the GOP love fest in New York where we were

told there was nothing to worry about. We edited a new beginning to

our award winning film Counting on Democracy and went back to the

Independent Television Service which helped fund it and got it on PBS

to see if public television stations would rebroadcast it.

 

To our surprise, not one would. It is as if the fiasco in Florida had

been forgotten. That's right, not one station would broadcast it.

That's a ZERO response to a film that had been well received just four

years earlier with millions saying then `we will never forget

Flori-duh.' How quickly we forgot! It was if there had been national

outbreak of media-fed amnesia.

And then, as predicted in 2004, came the calamity in Ohio. Concerns

with ballot rigging and other methods used to dampen Democratic turn

out were briefly noted and barely pursued or covered. Kphn Kerry

seemed bullied into accepting an outcome that many had doubts about.

More recently accounts from across the country of breakdowns in

electronic voting machines were glossed over. All were reported

locally but, together, never aggregated to become the kind of national

story and scandal they should be.

 

Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman who follow this story closely and

wrote a book about what really went down in Ohio comment in a recent

story in the Free Press published in Columbus Ohio, " there has been

barely a whiff of coverage in the major media about any problems with

the electronic voting machines. "

 

The public on the other hand not only believes that there are problems

but many insist that the elections were stolen. Write Wasserman and

Fitrakis: " A recent OpEdNews/Zogby People's poll of Pennsylvania

residents, found that " 39% said that the 2004 election was stolen. 54%

said it was legitimate. But let's look at the demographics on this

question. Of the people who watch Fox news as their primary source of

TV news, one half of one percent believe it was stolen and 99% believe

it was legitimate. Among people who watched ANY other news source but

FOX, more felt the election was stolen than legitimate. The numbers

varied dramatically. "

 

" Here, from that poll, are the stations listed as first choice by

respondents and the percentage of respondents who thought the election

was stolen: CNN 70%; MSNBC 65%; CBS 64%; ABC 56%; Other 56%; NBC 49%;

FOX 0.5%.

 

" With 99% of Fox viewers believing that the election was " legitimate, "

only the constant propaganda of Rupert Murdoch's disinformation

campaign stands in the way of a majority of Americans coming to grips

with the reality of two consecutive stolen elections. "

 

Bi-partisan Commissions have studied this problem. One led by

ex-president Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker

noted, " Software can be modified maliciously before being installed

into individual voting machines. There is no reason to trust insiders

in the election industry any more than in other industries. "

 

A recent Wall Street Journal story revealed, " Some former backers of

the technology seek return to paper ballots, citing glitches, fraud

fears. "

Aviel Rubin, a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University,

did an analysis of the security flaws in the source code for Diebold

touch-screen machine. After studying the latest problems, The Times

reported Rubin said: " I almost had a heart attack. The implications of

this are pretty astounding. "

 

Worse still, the Congress is burying reform measures with scant media

attention. Chellie Pingree, president of Common Cause writes: " What is

Congress doing? Nothing. Right now HR 550, The Voter Confidence and

Increased Accessibility Act the bill, which would take care of these

problems, is languishing in committee. The bill has 186 cosponsors,

more support than most bills voted on in the House. "

 

Stories like this just dribble out with little follow up and less

investigation. Isn't the threat to democracy here self-evident and

worthy of more media attention? The press has a long tradition of

skepticism. Have they become skeptical about the workings of democracy

itself? Why has the heart of our democratic process become such a

`ho-hummer, "

Don't they realize the truth expressed by one of our Mediachannel

readers Donna Perlmutter who writes: " Without free, fair elections,

nothing else matters. "

 

New Dissector Danny Schechter is " blogger in chief " at MediaChannel.

Org and author of " The Death of the Media and the Fight to Save

Democracy " News. Email to: dissector

© 2006 MediaChannel.org

[Guest guest]

It's incredible that this apparent blindness exists among people that comment on

the media refusal to faithfully cover " election problems. " Is it such a

mystery? The question seems to me to be, why do so many of our TV 'journalists'

and political reporters seem perfectly willing to talk about the " complexities "

of our voting scandal in this country, but are so unwilling to discuss what all

of this means, in simple terms; terms that state plainly, openly and

unequivically, that elections are being stolen in our nation? Isn't this

related to the fact that our TV networks are owned and operated by the same

elites that favor, and gain from, stolen elections?

Where's the mystery?

jp

-

califpacific

Thursday, May 25, 2006 7:14 PM

MEDIA PAYS SCANT ATTENTION TO VOTING

PROBLEMS- " Without free, fair elections, no

 

 

" Arlene Montemarano " <mikarl

MEDIA PAYS SCANT ATTENTION TO VOTING PROBLEMS- " Without free,

fair elections, nothing else matters "

 

Why is the Media Downplaying Our Voting Scandal?

by Danny Schechter

 

Explain this to me. Why do so few of our TV " journalists " and

political reporters seem interested in all the questions that have

been raised about the integrity of our voting system?

(snip)