The greatest story never told......

[kuozzman]

http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/1006

(SNIP)
The United States is in crisis, 271 years after Zenger established press freedom as a precious right of Americans. A new despot has emerged in the form of corporate control of media. Our big-city newspapers and TV networks have consolidated; what the public learns and what it doesn’t is governed by a handful of oligarchs more concerned with the financial status quo, about their earnings and pleasing Wall Street, than about informing citizens. In 1733, what King George didn’t want printed was libel. Today, what the media barons don’t want read might not be libel…but it doesn’t get printed, either.
(SNIP)
The New York Times devoted several front-page stories to the fraudulent election…in the Ukraine, that is. Its one front-page article on allegations of election fraud in Florida and Ohio carried a headline suggesting that Internet bloggers had been devising wild conspiracy theories, but that sensible folks were quickly debunking them. Meanwhile, Senator John Conyers, ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, held hearings in Washington and Columbus, Ohio at which witnesses detailed gruesome incidents of voter intimidation and disenfranchisement. A software programmer offered an affidavit stating that in October, 2000, a Florida state legislator (now a congressman) had asked the programmer’s company to devise a vote-rigging prototype, which the programmer did…in time for the 2000 election. The congressman in question had been Jeb Bush’s running mate in a 1994 gubernatorial race. The allegation has not been refuted, except in the form of a non-specific blanket denial by the software company and its lawyer. The congressman remains silent.