Columbia Journ Review: The Press & The Lessons of Ohio

[mod mom]

Guarding the Vote



THE PRESS AND THE LESSONS OF OHIO



In this issue’s cover piece, Eric Umansky points out that journalists not only seek to publicize truths but also help determine which truths count. A story’s tone, its placement, and whether it gets followed up all have something to do with whether it is perceived by the public as a big deal. Sometimes the press seems leery of making that determination.

The possibility of manipulation of the vote in national elections is that kind of story. It’s as if we don’t want to go there. Consider the battleground state of Ohio in the 2004 presidential election. As in Florida in 2000 — when Katherine Harris was both secretary of state and co-chair of the Bush-Cheney state campaign committee — Ohio’s secretary of state, Kenneth Blackwell, was also co-chair of Bush’s re-election campaign in Ohio. And as in Florida, there was controversy.

But it didn’t get too much mileage. For one thing, unlike Florida’s razor-thin 537-vote margin in 2000, Bush officially carried Ohio by some 136,000 votes. Tales of vote manipulation were generally covered either as small potatoes or as squawks from the loony left (which some were). The story never quite went away — The Washington Post and The Columbus Dispatch dipped in, among other papers, as did Vanity Fair, Harper’s, The American Prospect, and a couple of books. When the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, John Conyers Jr., issued a measured but blistering report that found “numerous serious election irregularities . . . which affected hundreds of thousands of votes,” Ohio got another few minutes in the spotlight.

Ohio popped up again in a June 15 piece in Rolling Stone by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The headline asked, “Was the 2004 Election Stolen?” Kennedy thought so. But most of the media yawned. The New York Times, typically strong on voting controversy, dealt with the Rolling Stone story in its abysmal Sunday Styles section with a profile of Kennedy that managed to mention the drug problem he had some twenty years ago, but not to fairly present his argument. One outlet that did not ignore the piece was Salon, where the staff writer Farhad Manjoo asserts that he takes Kennedy’s argument apart, but, upon close inspection, much of the Rolling Stone analysis survives. And Manjoo does not address a lot of what went wrong in Ohio.

-SNIP

http://www.cjr.org/issues/2006/5/Editorial.asp

[Kurovski]

1. Even in this fine piece, the authors are fearful of being branded

"conspiracy theorists", so pervasive was that meme as promoted by the prominent corporate media.

To wit: "We’re not making the case that the election of 2004 was stolen, and we’d rather look ahead than back."

Also the mention that some election fraud activists were indeed from the "loony left" seemed unnecessary. I mean, there are loonies everywhere, correct? We've got loonies in the White House fer cry-eye.

A more straightforward, un-self-conscious tone would have done wonders for this overly cautious piece. We are after all, talking about our American freedoms here. You know, the ones the terrorists are after?

Recommended anyway. :-)