Those Election Results Again

Guest-posting for Atrios, Avedon Carol discussed Tribune Media Services columnist Robert Koehler becoming radicalized on details of the 2004 presidential results. He attended a conference on election reform last year, where he was introduced to quite a bit of information about the election he'd never been aware of. I'm betting not many of the rest of us are aware of it, either. After all, where would we find out? The liberal media's not covering it at all. I'm sure it's out there on the Web, but unless you know what you're looking for, it could be difficult to find. Did anybody hear about this election conference, which was held in Nashville? Was there any local coverage (I'm betting there wasn't much, or Article 19 would've been on it.) Koehler is one of the very few writers with mainstream access who's even touching on this. (He's syndicated nationally, so subscribing papers can choose to use his material on a column by column basis--not many are picking up his latest material. His column doesn't actually run in The Chicago Tribune itself.) You can read his columns at his personal site. Unfortunately, they're not dated there, so it's not clear when they were initially written, but my understanding is that the columns on election reform have all appeared within the last month.

His first of these was "The Silent Scream of Numbers," with the tag line "The 2004 election was stolen--will someone please tell the media?" He followed that with "Democracy's Abu Ghraib," tagged, "If they can disable an election, what's coming next?" Interestingly, although, as I said, Koehler doesn't normally appear on The Chicago Tribune editorial page, The Trib ran an answer column by Don Wycliff, responding to Koehler's first election column. When Koehler responded in kind, his column was spiked--the Tribune Media Service did not distribute it. Koehler was told it was because many who might be reading wouldn't have seen Wycliff's piece from the Tribune editorial page, which is true, but Tribune readers hadn't seen Koehler's material when Wycliff wrote his column, and that didn't stop it from running. Still, Koehler has said that, despite the column being killed, he was not being discouraged from writing further on the subject. Indeed, he replaced the column with one featuring letters from readers on the topic. Although there seems to be some internal politics going on at the syndicate, I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt and take Koehler at his word that he doesn't feel he's being censored. It'll be interesting to see if anybody else in the liberal media picks up on this. At the very least, I hope Koehler continues to investigate it himself.