Mainstream TV Mute on Election Fraud

BLOGGED BY Brad Friedman ON 1/9/2008 4:35PM

Tribune Media: MSM Failed to Note 'Hackable Diebold Red Flags' in New Hampshire Primary Results

Syndicated Columnist Robert Koehler Writes for Tomorrow's Papers: 'Possibility of Tainted Results, a Prospect Most of Media Can't Bear'
Notes Problems With NH's Diebold Machines 'Remain Unsolved'...
Syndicated Tribune Media Services columnist Bob Koehler bumps up our serious concerns about last night's wholly untransparent, and still-uncounted (by anything but a hackable Diebold computer, and a company with an executive criminal past, to say the least) New Hampshire Primary election results, from "blogger conspiracy theory" to mainstream media concern.
Here are the first few grafs of his column, set to run in tomorrow's editions of subscribing mainstream media papers. (Stealth adds and forget any coverage on corporate TV news).


As the breathless sports coverage of the presidential primaries bursts around me this morning, I’m doing my best to resist surrendering to the contrived drama about “comeback kids” and the flying shrapnel of numbers and hold onto my troubled skepticism about the electoral process, or at least most of it.
First of all, before we get too enthusiastic about feminist solidarity or wax knowingly about New Hampshire Democrats’ traditional soft-heartedness toward the Clinton family, let’s ponder yet again the possibility of tainted results, which is such an unfun prospect most of the media can’t bear to remember that all the problems we’ve had with electronic voting machines — and Diebold machines in particular, which dominate New Hampshire polling places — remain unsolved.







Did the Hillary campaign really defy the pollsters? She had been trailing Barack Obama by 13 percentage points, 42 to 29, in a recent Zogby poll, as election watchdog Brad Friedman pointed out. And the weekend’s “rapturous packed rallies for Mr. Obama,” as the New York Times put it, “suggested Mrs. Clinton was in dire shape.”
So when she emerged from the Tuesday primary with an 8,000-vote and 3-percentage-point victory over Obama, perhaps — considering the notorious unreliability, not to mention hackability, of Diebold machines — the media might have hoisted a few red flags in the coverage, rather than immediately chalk the results up to Clinton’s tears and voter unpredictability. (Oh, if only more reporters considered red flags patriotic.)




The fact is, whatever actually happened in New Hampshire voting booths on Tuesday, our elections are horrifically insecure. For instance, Bev Harris, of the highly respected voting watchdog organization Black Box Voting, recently wrote that the Diebold 1.94w optical scan machines used in some 55 percent of New Hampshire precincts (representing more than 80 percent of the state’s voters) are “the exact same make, model and version hacked in the Black Box Voting project in Leon County (Florida)” a few years ago. They haven’t been upgraded; the security problems haven’t been fixed.
National, or at least media, denial about this situation doesn’t say much for the strength of our democracy.
...
And this opening comment from Wikipedia on Operation Mockingbird might explain why we hear little on election fraud from our national media.

Operation Mockingbird is a Central Intelligence Agency operation to influence domestic and foreign media, whose activities were made public during the Church Committee investigation in 1975 (published 1976).
The word Mockingbird was first used by Deborah Davis in Katharine the Great (1979). Deep in the pages of his 2007 memoir "American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond," E. Howard Hunt' pulls open the curtain on covert history and details the existence of “Project Mockingbird,” in which print and broadcast media players were used for both propaganda and active intelligence gathering inside the United States, a direct violation of what was then its technical legal function.

..As usual however the reader is encouraged to be aggressive in the pursuit of truth and the facts to substantiate an argument. When you see the wealth of data that exists that incriminates the corporate media with the Bush crime syndicate it is quite astounding.
All the more important to be awake - remember the price of democracy is eternal vigilance.