Bob Koehler " I'm not used to BEING the news"

[Wiley50]

Let's show this Tribune Public Editor the FULL WRATH of DU!
A Good Man has been Dissed
and I, for one, am pissed!
They won't print his original excellent piece
Just this HATCHET JOB of it!
Go tear him up, Brethren and Sisteren!

Wiley


From : Koehler, Bob <[email protected]>
Sent : Thursday, April 28, 2005 8:51 AM
To : "Koehler, Bob" <[email protected]>
Subject : I'm not used to BEING the news!

Thanks to everyone who contacted the Tribune about running my column "The Silent Scream of Numbers," about election 2004 irregularities. Public editor Don Wycliff responded, more or less. While Tribune readers aren't ready to read the whole unexpurgated column, they were at least given the debunked version. This is the way closed minds open!

Let us now have a moment of silence for the moral leadership of Richard Nixon.

Bob

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-0504280106apr28,0,5908365.column?coll=chi-ed_opinion_publiced-utl

When winning isn't everything


Published April 28, 2005

If someone had told me 30 years ago that I would one day invoke Richard M. Nixon as a moral example, I'd have said the person was nuts. But that's what I'm about to do.

Legend has it that after the 1960 presidential election, an aide informed Nixon that there was enough evidence of irregularities in the results of the balloting in Illinois that a strong challenge to John F. Kennedy's victory here could be mounted.

To his credit, Nixon is said to have rejected a challenge as not worth putting the country through. In other words, winning wasn't the sole end of politics.

That Nixon legend came to mind this week as I opened what seemed the 1,000th e-mail in which the writer declared that the results of the 2004 presidential election are suspect and suggested that, instead of pursuing evidence of election theft and corruption, the Tribune and the rest of the "corporate media" are intent on ignoring the facts.

The most recent of this correspondence commends to the attention of the newspaper's editors a column, "The Silent Scream of Numbers," written by a fellow Tribune Co. employee, Bob Koehler.

Koehler is an editor at Tribune Media Services, the company's syndication arm, and also writes a syndicated column. He wrote "The Silent Scream of Numbers" after attending what was dubbed the National Election Reform Conference earlier this month in Nashville.

It was, he wrote, "an extraordinary pulling together of disparate voting-rights activists--30 states were represented, 15 red and 15 blue--sponsored by a Nashville group called Gathering to Save Our Democracy. It had the feel of 1775; citizen patriots taking matters into their own hands to reclaim the republic."

That's one way of looking at it. Another is as a convocation of conspiracy theorists, unable to come to terms with the fact that their guy lost and that, as in sports, it's not the pregame prognostication and expert opinions that count, but the numbers on the scoreboard after the contest has actually been played.

Koehler is sensitive to the "conspiracy nut" charge and attempted in his "silent scream" column to blunt it by avoiding the question whether the 2004 election was "stolen."

Instead, he posed questions like "why the lines were so long and the voting machines were so few in Columbus and Cleveland and inner-city and college precincts across the country"; "why so many PhD-level mathematicians and computer programmers and other numbers-savvy scientists are saying that the numbers don't make sense"; and what about "those exit polls, which in years past were extraordinarily accurate but last November went haywire, predicting Kerry by roughly the margin by which he ultimately lost to Bush."

I'm not sure that all of Koehler's questions could ever be answered. But because so many of them seem to involve the conduct of the election in Ohio, I decided to ask the most reliable authority I know: Tribune national correspondent Tim Jones.

An Ohio native, Jones spent a great deal of time in the state last year, including the last two weeks before the election. On Election Day he was in the Columbus area, visiting polling places that ranged from silk-stocking suburban to poverty-ridden inner city. At the latter, he said, "I talked to people who waited in line four hours and were determined to vote."

Jones pointed out that in Columbus and Cleveland--where Koehler says "lines were so long and the voting machines were so few"--final decisions on where to place the available voting machines belonged to local election officials, who in each case were Democrats.

It's always possible that these Democrats were secretly working for Bush's re-election, but not likely. What's more likely is that they based their decisions on placement of people and equipment on earlier elections, when turnout in inner-city and college precincts lagged that in other areas.

Jones said he has talked at length with people in Ohio whose credentials as non-partisan and unbiased are beyond question, and they, he said, "found no irregularities."

Koehler and those who have been boosting his "silent scream" column make one very powerful point: It is the duty of the news media, as watchdogs of our democracy, to study, identify and shine a spotlight on weaknesses and abuses in our most fundamental democratic activity--elections.

But if the real agenda of the election reformers is to call into question the legitimacy of the 2004 election, they would be better advised to follow the example of Richard Nixon. Winning isn't the sole end of politics.

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Don Wycliff is the Tribune's public editor. He listens to readers' concerns and questions about the paper's coverage and writes weekly about current issues in journalism. His e-mail address is [email protected]. The views expressed are his own.