I hope you’re asking, Why haven’t America’s own daily papers and news networks led these investigations?
I suspect it’s partly the magic-show thing. No one inside the Great American Circus Tent likes to believe they’re being fooled. America likes to think of itself as a democracy. No one really wants to know their ballot has gotten hijacked, boosted, deep-sixed, caged, purged, stuck inside a robot’s pocket, fiddled, filched, flimmed, or flammed.
When Katherine Harris purged tens of thousands of innocent black voters as felons in 2000, BBC put it right at the top of the prime-time news, and the Guardian newspaper on its front page. All over the world, headlines screamed about the Fix in Florida—except in the US, where the story was on page nothing.
I have to admit that the New York Times did editorialize against “Florida manipulating voter rolls to purge felons . . . removing black voters who were not felons.” But the Times published that comment about the 2000 election in 2012. A decade earlier, the Paper of Record flat-out refused the story from the Guardian. CBS News also declined to run the BBC story because, Dan Rather’s producer told me, the story “didn’t stand up.” CBS’s investigation consisted of: “We called Jeb Bush’s office.” Bush’s PR flunky told CBS that our BBC story was wrong. And for CBS News, that was good enough.
You can’t make this up.
I have neither sufficient time, space, nor alcohol to enumerate the failings of what is laughably called “news reporting” in the USA. But I have to mention at least four -isms that scare away America’s press from covering the finagling of the vote:
Let me illustrate from the best in American reporting:
In May 2012, National Public Radio announced that Governor Rick Scott had ordered a purge of 182,000 “non-citizens” from Florida voter rolls. In one of those deep and self-serious voices used by NPR reporters, we were told:
“Republican leaders say the new voting rules are needed to combat fraud. Recently, state elections officials began an investigation that appears to give that argument some credence. They announced they’re examining registrations of thousands of Florida voters who may not be US citizens. The chairman of Florida’s Republican Party, Lenny Curry, says the investigation shows why tighter voting rules are necessary.”
Okay, class: What is the credible evidence, the facts reviewed by NPR, that give “some credence” to the accusation that over a hundred thousand aliens are registered?
One would think that “credence” would mean finding illegal voters. No one has yet found a single one as of this writing. Certainly not NPR, which blessed the Republican voter-roll purge list—without obtaining a copy of the list.
NPR was quick to balance its conclusion that the list was, in part, credible, with a statement that “voting rights activists say the investigation is an attempt by a Republican administration to bolster the legal case for the restrictions.”
Well, is it or isn’t it? Are there illegal alien voters or not? If you are an NPR listener all you got was a load of he-said, she-said, and a pitch for a coffee mug.
Wow! Illegal aliens! From Mexico? From Mars? From Andromeda?
NPR won’t say because NPR’s ace reporter didn’t, uh, look at the list.
The Paper of Record, the New York Times, delved deeper:
“Some of the people on an initial list of 2,700 possible noncitizens sent to county election supervisors were either naturalized citizens or were born in the United States.”
Some people? Did the Times go through the list? Nyet.
By saying “some,” the Times implicitly endorses the idea that the purge list is mostly accurate. Indeed, the headline, “Florida Steps Up Effort Against Illegal Voters,” gives the conclusion that there are illegal voters, and even, in liberal high dudgeon, when the paper questions the purge, it states the purge list “may well include legitimate voters.”
“May?” MAY???
There ain’t no “may” about it. Aliens registering or voting have committed a felony crime punishable by imprisonment and deportation. The attorney general of Florida says he’ll arrest every one—if, in fact, they are lawbreakers. Out of the 182,000 illegal alien voters in the “crime wave,” Florida has scooped up exactly none.
I’ve made this public promise: if 182 criminal voters are found, just one in a thousand, I will chew Governor Scott’s shorts in the Capitol rotunda. So far, I have not been invited to dine.
US Attorney Iglesias said of the similar alien witch-hunt ordered by Karl Rove in New Mexico that he ran all over the mesas and couldn’t find one. Not one.
So who is on the Florida list? Like the ones in several other states, it is a brilliant manipulation of data-matching algorithms. Playing on the flaws in data sets, GOP officials are able to gin up “suspects” for a crime not committed. It’s brilliant because in a state where whites make up 74 percent of the voter rolls, the purge list is 74 percent black and Hispanic. Hmmm.
So the game is played skillfully by the vote snatcher: the US media accepts on its face that there are millions of illegal voters nationwide; aliens so wily and devious and talented that even though they present themselves in person, and list their addresses, they are never caught.
For the media, the only issue is whether the method used to hunt down these phantoms is fair or not. So, the Times concludes:
“No process is perfect,” said Lenny Curry, the chairman of the Republican Party in Florida. “That doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be a process and you shouldn’t try to protect the system.”
Why don’t we get the full story? That the lists are nearly 100 percent bullshit and crafted as such deliberately?
Let’s go back to the four -isms. First, the US media hates hates hates to take the time, energy, and expense to actually hunt down the evidence and review it. “Lazy-ass-ism” is not necessarily the choice of reporters but a limit imposed by greedy-ass networks and producers afraid of taking a position on the facts.
A production team from 60 Minutes visited our office during our 2004 BBC investigation of vote suppression, asking to join with us. When we produced the actual purge lists, the CBS producer exclaimed, “Why, you’d have to spend a hundred hours going through that list!”
Well, no shit, Sherlock.
It’s much cheaper and easier to just report competing accusations, he-said, she-said. In place of news, we get, “Karl Rove says that the moon is made of cheese and stolen ballots and the ACLU says that’s not totally accurate.”
That’s called a “balanced” report.
It would not be “balanced,” however, to say the lists are deliberately created to have a Jim Crow profile. BBC gave me months to hunt the evidence. And when I found the smoking guns showing that the racial attack on innocents was deliberate, budgeted with millions of tax dollars, BBC required me to confront the Florida secretary of state’s purge director, Clayton Roberts, with the evidence. When I did, he ripped off his microphone, ran into his office (with me running behind), locked the door, and called in the state troopers to have me and my camera crews frogmarched out of the capitol.
You can’t show that on US television. It’s considered “advocacy” reporting. Or worse, “muckraking.” Not “balanced.” In the rest of the world, it’s called journalism. Not that I’m complaining.
The Times and NPR are the good journalists. But then there’s fiction, falsehood, factual flatulence, and Fox, the network that features the hysterical vote-fraud fantasies of fakers like John Fund. I don’t have time to show you all the nuts in that fruitcake, but let me give you one doozy from Fund, who claims that there wasn’t a single case of wrongful disenfranchisement of African American voters.
Mr. Fund, meet Mr. Steen. Gulf War veteran. Dad. Never had a parking ticket. BLA—and purged. Twice.