Passing Grades
How many local journalists deserve them for their coverage of the disputed Gregoire-Rossi gubernatorial election? Not many, at least not many that I have seen.
Maybe I am too harsh a grader. I would fail any journalist who says "count every vote", when even Gregoire usually qualifies that with "legitimate". I would fail any journalist who is so ignorant of the Florida dispute that they would write this:
What was so jolting about the 2000 presidential election is that it ended when a court stepped in and declared: No, you cannot recount the votes. You cannot try to get a better sense of who really won.
In a clearly partisan 5-to-4 ruling, the court decided the presidency. It was a shocking low point in American democracy. The court said: Voters don't have the final say, we do.
(Those who want some sport may want to try to count the errors in those two paragraphs.)
I would fail any journalist who simply dismisses the possibility that the Republicans may have a case.
They [the Democrats] didn't cheat, they didn't concoct votes that weren't real, they merely found the uncounted votes they needed while Republicans missed their opportunity to do the same.
And David Horsey misrepresents what the Republicans, most of them anyway, are charging. Most are not arguing that Democratic officials fabricated pro-Gregoire ballots, but that the lax procedures in King County, and perhaps in other counties, allowed illegal votes, in what I have called "distributed vote fraud".
Horsey, and many other journalists, take comfort in Secretary of State Sam Reed's claim that the election was conducted honestly. That may be true in the sense that election officials did not create fraudulent ballots themselves, but that does not mean that no fraudulent ballots were created. And Horsey ignores the contrary opinions of former Governor Dan Evans, and former Secretary of State Ralph Munro, both of whom favor a re-vote. Not necessarily because of fraud, but because King County so badly botched its procedures.
I would fail any executive editor who did not make a serious effort to investigate the Republican charges. We know, from many national stories, that as the use of absentee ballots has spread, so has fraud. We know, from many national stories, that many non-citizens, including most famously 8 of the 9/11 hijackers, have been registered to vote. Is it wholly implausible that Christine Gregoire may have received 130 illegal votes, net, from those sources?
It's not that readers are uninterested in reading about this subject; take a look at the letters to the PI from Friday, Sunday, and Monday. Nearly half of them, I would say, refer to the research that Stefan Sharkansky has been doing (with a little help from his friends). So why don't our newspapers try to do some of the same research?
Finally, I would fail any journalist who gave Ron Sims a pass. He is, after all, the King County executive and he promised in 2003 to clean up King County elections. At the very least it is clear that the job is not finished. Has Sims chosen the right person to clean up the mess? Has he given Dean Logan enough authority? Enough resources? For some reason, almost no journalist seems interested in asking Sims these questions, or holding him accountable for the mess this year.
So which journalists would earn passing grades so far? David Postman of the Seattle Times, Robert Mak of King 5 (for the ballot story), and two at the Seattle Weekly, Rick Anderson and George Howland. Robert Jamieson of the Seattle PI deserves some credit for arguing that people in the military should vote, but then even Paul Berendt agrees with that — in principle, while finding it merely sad that in practice men who were fighting in Fallujah did not know the technical details of our election laws.
But those are all the journalists that would get passing grades — at least from me. If you know of some more who deserve to pass by those standards, please add them in the comments.
Cross posted at Jim Miller on Politics.
(In a few days, I'll have a post up on Oh, That Liberal Media describing a rather different reaction by journalists to a disputed election. How many days? That depends on how good the conditions are for cross country skiing in the next few days.)
Posted by Jim Miller at 04:40 PM | Comments (0)
Categories: 2004 Governor's Race |
