Why is the Media Downplaying Our Voting Scandal?
by Danny Schechter
Published on Friday, May 19, 2006
by CommonDreams.org
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http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0519-32.htm><snip>
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.
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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. John 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."
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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."
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