The Astute E&P Watchdogs Stay Alert While the Mainstream Media They Watch Stay Asleep...
By Brad Friedman on 11/30/2005, 11:38am PT  

Dave Astor of the excellent and respected Editor & Publisher covers two matters we've discussed here recently.

Last night he did a quick item on the Ann Coulter/Lydia Cornell outrage. For the record, Coulter still has Lydia's private information posted publicly on her website some 48 hours after it was posted there. She has been asked politely to remove it. She has chosen not to.

As Cornell pointed out in her response yesterday, that sort of thing helped Bill O'Reilly blow his stack recently when he thought (incorrectly, of course) that a "liberal" group had posted a private email address on their website. Of course, it doesn't take much for the increasingly unstable O'Reilly to blow his stack these days.

As well, Astor covered Robert Koehler's latest Tribune Media Services' "Poll Shock" column that we briefly reported on last week. His coverage gathers additional comments from both the Dispatch Public Affairs Editor Darrel Rowland and Koehler on the "staggeringly impossible" results of Ohio's recent Nov. 8th 2005:

Will the Dispatch look into possible fraud or malfunctions connected with electronic voting technology? "We need solid evidence that there's something untoward," replied Rowland.

I love that. It's the exact same thing we heard after the '04 Presidential Election: Once someone else finds the "solid evidence" the media will be happy to report on it. Note to Mainstream Media: It's your job to investigate the smoke and find out if there's a fire! Otherwise, what the hell do we need investigative reporters for at all? Oh, yeah. Apparently, we don't. The bloggers will do it for you. (But don't come running to us wondering why it is that your readership is falling over a cliff in the meantime!)

Koehler's reponse to Rowland in E&P:

Koehler wrote: "Why, I wonder, in a state that made a national spectacle of itself with widespread irregularities and voter disenfranchisement a year ago, would there be so little interest in investigating whether the 'voting chaos' reported by the Toledo Blade or the 'night of surprises' reported by the Dayton Daily News could have produced tainted results?"

And Koehler concluded sarcastically that "the spark won't jump in the media mind. You know: Hmm, we have widespread confusion in the voting process, a recent GAO report that cites many glaring insecurities in e-voting, and our own polls indicating big victories that turn into big defeats. Could it be? Nah! What are we thinking? This is the world's greatest democracy."

Go Bob. And thank you, E&P.

UPDATE: And speaking of Koehler, this just in from his latest column which will be published tomorrow and available then to read at this location:

"Our goal . . . is to help others find their own voice, attain their own freedom, and make their own way."

Dig up an old lie from one of George Bush's forgotten speeches and the stench is asphyxiating, as though it's coming from the rotting corpse of democracy itself. The words quoted above are from the president's inaugural address in January - the odor intensified by recent news that the president allegedly wanted to bomb the headquarters of al-Jazeera

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Article Categories: Ann Coulter, Election Irregularities, Ohio, Bob Koehler