I posted a diary here the other day, under the title "Kerry blows Ohio recount," lamenting the fact that an Ohio judge had refused to accelerate the recount because the minority parties bringing the action had no reasonable hope of winning, although he would have considered ordering a speedup if Kerry, et al., had entered the action as plaintiffs instead of dithering along as "interested parties."
This inaction seemed to me to be the clearest possible indictment of the Kerry camp's "watch and wait" approach having cost us (yes, "us," it is not now and never has been John Kerry's personal election) an opportunity to get a serious recount and an accounting for the bizarre election here in Ohio.Much has been said of the lack of attention paid by the mainstream media to all of this, and rightly so. But here again, a more serious indication from Kerry that he intended to pursue a recount would have made this a story the media would
have to cover. Kerry could have made an enormous difference in how this situation played in the media.
But there's another piece to this picture -- the apparently near-universal moratorium on covering "voting irregularities" on the "mainstream" blogs. On Atrios, for example, aside from a high-profile weekend sulk and a few cranky and defensive postings in the "I'm not ignoring it, but don't tell me what to write" vein, there has been absolutely no coverage of any of the past three weeks' developments -- the lawsuits, Jesse Jackson's visit, the GAO investigation, the Congressional letter to Blackwell, none of it. One doesn't have to believe in a national RNC conspiracy to find these news developments worthy of comment and speculation (as Keith Olbermann has, for example), so what possible rationale can there be for blogs such as Atrios's, which have spent the last two years poring over far more arcane matters, to completely ignore this entire subject? There may not be a fire here, but this much smoke in itself becomes a story past a certain point, especially if John Conyers is one of those sounding an alarm.The reticence of the mainstream corporate media is no mystery, but what's up when you have to say that the "MSM" is, in its own pathetic fashion, doing a better job on this story than the blogosphere heavyweights?
This is not an academic or tangential point. Pressure from the big blogs -- Atrios, Marshall, Kos -- would have been pressure on both Kerry and the corporate media. It could have made a real difference -- perhaps strengthened Kerry's backbone, even -- to the ultimate result. Has fear of being labelled "tinfoil hatters" led to the front line of the blogosphere gagging itself?