Many of us have been frustrated by the media's rather deafening silence on the voting irregularities/voter suppression story from Election 2004 (US that is, not Ukrainian). Keith Olbermann and his show "Countdown" on MSNBC has been a notable exception, but for the most part there has been little of coverage of the lingering questions from Election 2004 discussed here daily.
However, in the past few days there have been a few breaks in the ice here and there. I'd like to try a small experiment to see if we can widen the cracks any.
I'd like to start with CNN. Why them? Well, part of it has to do with the fact that Aaron Brown ran a small overview of the issue a few days ago. Part of it is that CNN is drifting towards Fox territory, and anything we can do to persuade them to halt motion rightwards is worthwhile. And part of it is that in cable news, CNN still has a lot of clout. For more on what I propose, see below the fold...
In a nutshell, the idea is this. CNN's website has a service where they provide e-mail alerts on various topics to their web "audience." These alerts are free, but you do have to go through a registration process to sign up for them. Once you've gone through the process, however, you can either subscribe to alerts based on CNN's pre-existing keywords,
or you can custom design your own alerts using your own keywords.
My idea is to encourage all Kossacks who are interested in seeing more news coverage of the voting irregularities/voter suppression stories from Election 2004, to sign up for CNN news alerts utilitizing the following two customized keyword phrases:
voting irregularities
ohio election
I've already tried searches with these two terms, and most of the relevant stories CNN has done in the past two weeks came up on one or the other of these searches. To improve the experiment further, it would be interesting if you linked to the news alert subscription page from the small box on the bottom right that appears on each news story page. Here's a good CNN story posted today to link from:
Suit seeks new look at rejected Ohio ballots
It doesn't hurt to give the story as many page views as possible, and it is possible CNN tracks from which news story someone linked to the news alert page. If they do, this would give the news alert you subscribe to extra impact.
Or you can go straight to the link for Create Your Own CNN News Alert here.
The important thing is to use the following two keyword phrases, so they show up with a higher frequency and maybe catch some editor's notice:
voting irregularities
ohio election
Thank you for helping with this.
Let the experiment begin...