The Frankfurter School

A major focus of my interest is in things that are not being reported on by the so-called mainstream media. I have a close friend who refuses to give credence to any of my opinions or citations unless I can prove that it has been reported in the news section (not the op-ed section) of a major daily newspaper or TV network. My friend is on the right track in suspecting that a lot of information floating about the internet is unreliable and that he must figure out a way to filter it; he is dead wrong to use those guidelines for determining its legitimacy. In fact, if you rely only on mainstream news sources for information, you may find yourself among the most uninformed people in the world.

Nothing shakes trust in the mainstream news like actually being an eyewitness to a story. It became very clear just how inadequate most television and newspaper reporting is when I returned to my hometown in to Ohio to volunteer for MoveOnPAC’s Get-Out-The-Vote operation during the 2004 Election. On that rainy and dreary election day my sister and I stood shivering beneath umbrellas, the requisite 100 feet away from the entrance to the lonely rural public library where voting was taking place. As we checked off the names of people that we were expecting to show up, a pickup truck with out-of-state plates screeched into the parking lot and pulled up right in front of us. Three burly white men hopped out and ran over and started yelling at us. They were practically screaming: we were standing too close to the polling place, they were going to call the police, or worse, they might have to handle it themselves. I tried to maintain my cool and explain that we had carefully measured our distance from the polling place entrance, while one of the guys walked off his own estimate. They surrounded us and forced us to move back by about five feet, which we did. Within about five minutes, and after a lot more shouting, they got in their trucks and left as suddenly as they had arrived. It was an incredibly threatening and scary experience, and even though none of them had laid a hand on us or made any direct threats, I felt as though we had been attacked.

We returned home that night to trade stories with our mother, who was working as a volunteer for the county Democratic Party. She was helping to coordinate information between the hundreds of lawyers who had come to Ohio to observe the election and the local Party Headquarters. She told me story after story of the chaos and disarray that she had witnessed in the largely African-American precincts to which she had been assigned. Voting machines were locked in classrooms until late in the afternoon (effectively keeping the polls closed in that precinct for most of election day), number 2 pencils were mysteriously missing from entire buildings preventing anyone from marking the Diebold ballots, lines stretched out in long waits for too few voting machines, and Republican lawyers challenged the legitimacy of nearly everyone who tried to vote while Democratic lawyers acted powerless to do anything about it. Meanwhile, the out-of-state election observers standing outside were screaming bloody murder, unable to do anything because their non-resident status did not allow them any official status other than to literally observe. The Ohio Bar members representing the Democrats seemed to shrug and say, “what can we do?” There were multiple reports of bands of thugs with out-of-state license plates driving all over the county intimidating people, just as we had experienced. My mother witnessed two poll-watchers from Boston argue with a small and angry crowd over being too close to the polling entrance, the same charge we had faced. The Bostonians stood their ground against the mob, which resulted in them being arrested and sent to jail. All of these reports from these heavily-Democratic districts sharply contrasted with my parents’ own experiences voting at an all-white and predominantly Republican precinct where things were smooth and orderly all day, no lines, and no voters challenged.

The first-hand experiences that my mother, my sister and I had, combined with local news reports about the thousands of provisional ballots that were cast and not counted, as well as plenty of anecdotal evidence of fraud, led me to believe that four years after the weeks-long 2000 election debacle, a razor-thin margin of victory in the state that decided the whole race seemed to demand at least another day to figure out what all went wrong in Ohio. But I woke up the next morning to John Kerry giving a very gentlemanly concession speech and not a word about the irregularities in the papers or on TV. I felt angry, depressed, and betrayed. I scoured the web for information, anything that would confirm my own experiences and prove that something was amiss. And eventually I found it, but not in the news sections of mainstream daily newspapers.

I found Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman of the Columbus (Ohio) Free Press , who were devoting themselves to uncovering evidence of what was turning out to be a well-funded and coordinated campaign of disenfranchising Democratic voters. I discovered that Brad Friedman at BradBlog and Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting.org had been tirelessly collecting information on the irregularities around electronic voting. And while I kept reading The New York Times and The Washington Post waiting for the story to break, I was eventually disappointed to read that they decided that my concerns were the conspiracy theories of the lunatic fringe.

My point here is not to argue that Kerry won that election, or to claim certainty that the election results in Ohio would have gone the other way if the vote had been conducted fairly. My point about this all is that the the mainstream media largely ignored a big story, and were dismissive and derisive to bloggers and independent journalists who were putting in real investigative work. The irregularities surrounding this particular election were are particularly troubling; the overall case for fraud was laid out very comprehensively in a 2006 Rolling Stone article by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr and makes for good reading.

Admittedly, it can be difficult to report news when evidence is circumstantial and facts don’t add up. WIthout a whistle-blower or the proverbial “smoking gun,” circumstances that can’t possibly be coincidental often still leave rational investigative journalists unable to make the leap to solve a mystery. Most often, events occur to favor those in power and systems reward those who are already in control, so there need not be a phone call or clandestine meeting to have caused something to occur. Dick Cheney may not have ever had to have lifted a finger or let a single word escape his lips in support of his company Halliburton winning hundreds of no-bid contracts from the Pentagon. The mere fact of his having been the CEO of the company can allow people to make assumptions, which may be true or false, about the rewards that may lay ahead for helping his company profit from war, disaster and the functions of government. This is not a conspiracy, but deserves investigation and critical reporting.

The other massive problem that leads to the proliferation of conspiracy theories is the often woefully inadequate official story. At this point we are so conditioned to the government withholding information from us that we are immediately suspicious when some parts of an official story don’t add up. There is more than enough evidence to put serious holes in The Warren Commission report on the Kennedy assassination or the 9/11 Commission’s report on the Attacks on the United States. But there is an enormous gulf between recognizing inconsistencies in the official story and some of the more outlandish theories floating around about these two events. But not in the mainstream media. Anything that deviates from the official story and can’t be proven and is labeled a conspiracy, to the great detriment of the truth.

If I am seeming to suggest that the mainstream media lower its journalistic standards in order to report on stories without hard evidence then please forgive me. The media already does that – in an ingenious cycle perfected by The Drudge Report and Fox News. The way that it works is that Drudge will report a rumor and then Fox reports about the rumors on the blogs. Then the rest of the media follows suit because the sex- or scandal-ridden story always attracts ratings. So when we’re talking about an election campaign and charges that Barack Obama might be a Muslim that fly around on the internet, these rumors are reported, repeated, and carefully examined for why they seem to stick around. But let it be an organized campaign of voter disenfranchisement or something that takes more than a couple of words to explain and you can bet that there aren’t enough facts to make it “newsworthy.” Which leaves the mainstream media missing large and important chunks of information about what is going on in the world.

So the real conspiracy seems to be the use of the word “conspiracy” by mainstream media outlets to label anything that challenges their hold on power by pointing out their role as mere stenographers to power who often fail to meaningfully report the truth. I doubt that the editors and publishers of The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time Magazine and CNN have ever sat down in a room to agree to this plan. They didn’t have to – their interests are aligned and their behaviors reinforce one another. So it’s not a technically a conspiracy – but it is true.

There is nowhere else to turn but bloggers and independent journalists if you want to get real information about what is going on in the world. If you limit yourself to the establishment press, you will always be surprised by predictable events. When Condoleeza Rice said “I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into The World Trade Center,” despite multiple intelligence reports warning that terrorists were planning to use planes as missiles, and despite the fact that the building had already been the site of a terrorist attack eight years earlier, she must have been referring to people who received information only from the mainstream media, for they are truly in the dark.

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