Reply #21: more about the Times

[borealowl]

More generally, it's ODD that the Times isn't covering the 2004 possible election fraud story at least somewhat better. The story is absorbing millions of citizens, if you judge by my friends, many of whom seem to be following all the twists and turns of what is going on in Ohio, on the web. Not finding an article in the Times on the Conyers hearings the next day was startling. After all, C-Span had it live. The Times ran a dozen pre-election editorials about potential voting problems but when real problems occurred, they were dismissive, or mum altogether. Even though they know that people now have the ability to follow these things on the web, and therefore that many will start questioning the Times' commitment to "all the news that's fit to print."

In Florida 2000, aside from their peculiar way of telling their own recount story (which cost them a good deal of money to conduct, considering what poor use they made of it) they also ignored Greg Palast's faux felon story, which should have been front and center. Long afterwards, in retrospect, they referred to what happened with those voting rolls in passing, as if they HAD covered it. It would have been easy enough to put two and two together: the tens of thousands of people Choicepoint removed from the rolls because their names were similar to the names of possible ex-felons; and the thousands of long-time voters arriving at their precincts on election day and finding themselves no longer listed on the rolls. I once encountered a long-time elections worker from Miami who said that the election was clearly rigged and that's how it was done, primarily--people were arriving at their polling place, found themselves no longer registered, and there was no recourse for the elections workers--you couldn't get through to the busy phones at HQ, and if you did get through, HQ was unhelpful.

Had the Times covered that one story correctly, maybe we wouldn't be quite so Waist Deep in the Big Muddy now.

The Times in 2000 did run stories about the election of course; one for example about differential treatment of overseas/military ballots, one about overvotes in Duval County, and so forth. In the case of the overseas ballots the Times consulted some expert who concluded that the number of ballots involved would not have changed the election result (close, however!). The paper never added up the ballots involved in their different Florida stories. And their language in talking about all this was so convoluted.

It's like two completely different newspapers - the editorial page and the news page. On the inside, they editorialize against Bush's "disastrous" administration; on the front page, they kowtow. The inside scoop on their internal dynamics would be most interesting!

I've had a love/hate relationship with that paper for a long time. It's certainly not the newspaper it was a few decades ago. But they do run Paul Krugman!