Columbus Dispatch Distains Fact-based Reality

Sorry that I haven’t blogged in awhile. Been busy with many things, particularly the Save the Ballots campaign. I was helping coordinate research information related to the recent lawsuit by civil rights attorneys to save the ballots from the 2004 presidential election from destruction.

The mainstream corporate media’s coverage has been somewhat confusing. The New York Times wrote a ground-breaking story on Thursday, August 31 that everyone should read. It mentioned my forthcoming book , co-authored with Harvey Wasserman and Steve Rosenfeld, “What Happened in Ohio? A documentary record of theft and fraud in the 2004 election” by the New Press. While the Times coverage was great, as well as their follow-up editorial questioning e-voting, Ohio’s parochial papers like the Columbus Dispatch have continued their legacy of covering up the election theft and pretending like Ken Blackwell is an honest man.

Recently, they chastised Ted Strickland after their first debate (which did not include Bill Peirce and myself, despite the fact that we are gubernatorial candidates) for suggesting that Blackwell played a key role in Bush becoming president in 2000. Oddly, right wing political sites and the Bush family called J. Kenneth their “secret weapon” and assigned him the role of key election law advisor during the 2000 race in Florida.

The Dispatch has a long history of stating counter-factual information regarding Ken Blackwell and the Bush family’s illegal stealing of two elections. Take today’s paper, that quotes unnamed election officials “at the state and county levels” as saying it was “highly unlikely, if not impossible” for ballots to have been double-punched disproportionately in urban areas in the 2004 election, causing an “overvote” and consequently nullifying votes in heavily pro-Kerry areas. What the Dispatch hasn’t done with its enormous resources, is send its lazy and complacent reporters into actual Boards of Elections to look at real ballots.

On the other hand, the Columbus Institute for Contemporary Journalism/Free Press, with no fulltime staff member, has coordinated efforts that led to researchers looking at more than 50,000 actual ballots. A then-Dispatch reporter informed the Free Press that Michael Dawson, the media spokesperson for U.S. Senator Mike Dewine, lobbied the Dispatch editorial board not to assign any investigative resources to the 2004 election.

That’s why the Free Press is leading the charge to save the ballots, while the Dispatch, which hasn’t endorsed a Democratic presidential candidate since 1916, is leading the coverup.

Yesterday, Sept. 7, U.S. District Court Judge Algernon Marbley ordered all of Ohio’s 88 Boards of Elections to preserve all ballots in paper or electronic form from the 2004 presidential election until the civil rights suit, by inner city black organizations against Ken Blackwell, is resolved. Perhaps the Dispatch may throw off its partisan cloak and act like newspapers did in Florida, and actually count the statewide ballots. You remember:  when all the ballots were actually counted, they found that Gore won. Still, the Dispatch seems comfortable in its non-fact-based reality. Being a closely-held corporation, owned by a multimillionaire Republican family, doesn’t create much incentive for facts.