Fascinating and, I believe, totally ignored anecdote in the New York Review of Books a few months back helps properly contextualize, I believe, Republican claims about the election security vis-a-vis progressives objecting to the intimidation of minorities.
Please note that not only is the NYRB highly prestigious, but Massing's credentials are first-rate ( e.g., http://www.lettre-ulysses-award.org/... ) and while the entire article, unlike the anecdote, is not directly relevant to the listserve as such, it is relevant to all who care about America's political culture and so-called "marketplace of ideas."
"In late October 2004, Ken Silverstein, an investigative reporter in the Washington bureau of the Los Angeles Times, went to St. Louis to write about Democratic efforts to mobilize African-American voters. In 2000, the Justice Department later found, many of the city's black voters had been improperly turned away from the polls by Republican Party officials. Democrats were charging the Republicans with preparing to do the same in 2004, and Silverstein found evidence for their claim. Republican officials accused the Democrats of similar irregularities, but their case seemed flimsy by comparison, a point that even a local Republican official acknowledged to him.
While doing his research, however, Silverstein learned that the Los Angeles Times had sent reporters to several other states to report on charges of voter fraud, and, further, that his findings were going to be incorporated into a larger national story about how both parties in those states were accusing each other of fraud and intimidation. The resulting story, bearing the bland headline "Partisan Suspicions Run High in Swing States," described
the extraordinarily rancorous and mistrustful atmosphere that pervades battleground states in the final days of the presidential campaign. In Wisconsin, Ohio, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Oregon and other key states, Democrats and Republicans seem convinced their opponents are bent on stealing the election.
The section on Missouri gave equal time to the claims of Democrats and Republicans.
Troubled by this outcome, Silverstein sent an editor a memo outlining his concerns. The paper's "insistence on 'balance' is totally misleading and leads to utterly spineless reporting with no edge," he wrote. In Missouri, there was "a real effort on the part of the GOP...to suppress pro-Dem constituencies." The GOP complaints, by contrast, "concern isolated cases that are not going to impact the outcome of the election." He went on:
I am completely exasperated by this approach to the news. The idea seems to be that we go out to report but when it comes time to write we turn our brains off and repeat the spin from both sides. God forbid we should...attempt to fairly assess what we see with our own eyes. "Balanced" is not fair, it's just an easy way of avoiding real reporting and shirking our responsibility to inform readers.
This is not to deny that the best newspapers run many first-rate stories, Silverstein said, or that reporters working on long-term projects are often given leeway to "pile up evidence and demonstrate a case." During the last year, he has written articles on the ties between the CIA and the Sudanese intelligence service; on American oil companies' political and economic alliances with corrupt third-world regimes; and on conflicts of interest involving Pennsylvania Congressman John Murtha. When it comes to political coverage, though, Silverstein told me, newspapers are too often "afraid of being seen as having an opinion." They fear "provoking a reaction in which they'll be accused of bias, however unfounded the charge." The insistence on a "spurious balance," he says, is a widespread problem in how TV and print organizations cover news. "It's very stifling."" http://www.nybooks.com/...