The media's Minnesota debacle
With only about 200 votes out of nearly 3 million cast separating Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman and his Democratic challenger, Al Franken, the race is headed to a recount.
Naturally, conservative radio hosts are working themselves into a lather, baselessly accusing Democrats of trying to "steal" the election. That shouldn't surprise anyone. But NBC and The New York Times have also pushed the dubious notion that the Minnesota recount has been plagued by chaos and impropriety.
Here's how Meredith Vieira, co-host of NBC's Today, began a report on the Minnesota recount: "If you thought the election debacle in Florida could never happen again, wait until you see the situation in Minnesota."
This is nonsense. The "debacle" in Florida wasn't that there was a recount; the "debacle" was an absurdly designed ballot that led to thousands of people who meant to vote for Al Gore voting for Pat Buchanan instead. The "debacle" was that thousands of voters were improperly purged from voter rolls. The "debacle" was that the state's electoral votes were awarded to the candidate for whom fewer voters attempted to cast ballots. None of those factors are present in Minnesota.
The Minnesota Senate race is simply in the midst of a recount. Recounts happen. They aren't the illegitimate, anything-goes street fights the media pretend they are; they are a part of how elections work, their process written into law and executed every year. They are necessary, for a perfectly obvious reason: They make it more likely that the candidate who receives the most votes takes office. That is an unequivocally good thing.
During that Today segment, reporter Lee Cowan announced that the situation "has some remembering shades of Florida, of butterfly ballots and hanging chads. There are neither of those here."
What possible reason could there be for bringing up "butterfly ballots and hanging chads," given that "there are neither of those" present in Minnesota? Whatever the intent, the effect is clear -- it creates the impression that the situation in Minnesota is utter chaos, a "debacle" in the making.
Cowan continued: "Still, ballots have suddenly appeared out of nowhere, including some found unsecured in an election worker's car."
That appears to be completely false. Election officials have said the ballots did not "suddenly appear[] out of nowhere," and they were not "unsecured." The claim about unsecured ballots in a car appears to have originated with Norm Coleman's lawyer. Cowan did not attribute the car story to anyone or anything, he simply asserted it as fact. Adopting and repeating Coleman's lawyer's claims as though they are facts is bad enough. What makes it worse is that the lawyer had already backed off the claim. Two full days before Cowan's report, the Coleman lawyer had been quoted saying that "we've heard enough from the city attorney to let go of this. It does not appear that there was any ballot-tampering, and that was our concern."
So Cowan offered a sensational and -- by his own acknowledgement -- wholly irrelevant comparison to the "butterfly ballots and hanging chads" of the 2000 recount. Then he made a false assertion of ballots materializing out of thin air, and of unsecured ballots -- an assertion that seems to have been based entirely on the already-retracted claims of a Coleman campaign lawyer.
Vieira concluded the segment by referring to the "mess in Minnesota." But there is no mess. There is simply a recount -- a recount that does not involve butterfly ballots or hanging chads, a recount that, despite the best efforts of Vieira and Cowan to convince us otherwise, has not a thing in common with the "debacle" in Florida. Just a simple recount.
Today's New York Times similarly promoted the idea of chaos and impropriety in the Minnesota recount -- without actually providing any evidence or examples. The Times reported:
If Fritz Knaak has his way, Mr. Franken will never have a shot at solving those problems. A lawyer hired by Mr. Coleman expressly for the recount, Mr. Knaak described himself as "the new gun with the shiny pistol." Citing suspicion over what he called a series of "shenanigans" that have narrowed Mr. Coleman's lead, he has requested the official paper tape with the number of ballots and the time stamp printed out by each ballot machine, in every voting precinct.
The Times gave no examples of "shenanigans" or any indication of who is "suspicious" that such "shenanigans" have occurred. Nor did it give any indication that it asked Knaak for examples of either shenanigans or suspicion.
Later in the article, the Times reported:
Mr. Coleman's campaign manager, Cullen Sheehan, accused the Franken campaign of "a brazen, last minute act of desperation," by asking Hennepin County, which includes Minneapolis, to reconsider 461 rejected absentee ballots.
Mr. Franken's lead lawyer, Marc Elias, called such assertions of ballot stuffing "fanciful and bogus."
But there were no "assertions of ballot stuffing" -- none the Times reported, anyway. The Times simply quoted Coleman's campaign manager saying the Franken campaign's request to reconsider previously rejected ballots is an indication of "desperation." That's quite different from making an allegation of "ballot stuffing."
Then the Times reported that Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist Katherine Kersten expressed concerns about the ability of Minnesota's Democratic secretary of state, Mark Ritchie, to act impartially during the recount, without indicating Kersten's own political leanings. As Media Matters Senior Fellow Eric Boehlert explained, "Kersten is a right-winger who smeared Franken right before Election Day as a 'slanderer of Christianity.' "
Next, the Times quoted a "Republican researcher" who is "very, very concerned" about Ritchie. Then it quoted Sean Hannity saying "[f]ishy business" is occurring in Minnesota, where Democrats and elections officials are "up to no good." To what "[f]ishy business" was Hannity referring? Were his allegations legitimate? The Times did not say.
Finally, the Times quoted the Facebook status of "Noah Rouen, 34," a Minnesota man on a pheasant hunt who, along with his friends, "could not help but hatch a conspiracy theory."
If it seems the Times is desperate to find people concerned about the legitimacy of the Minnesota recount -- resorting to quoting vague allegations from hard-right partisans like Sean Hannity and Facebook conspiracy theories -- maybe that's because Tim Pawlenty, Minnesota's Republican governor, says there is "no actual evidence that there's been any fraud or problems." (That quote didn't appear in the Times article; maybe it got cut to make room for the pheasant hunter's Facebook status.) And as Media Matters noted, the Times did not note that Pawlenty said that the bipartisan state canvassing board Ritchie appointed to oversee the recount was "fair" and that a lawyer for Coleman's campaign reportedly said that the "state should feel good about who's on the panel."
The news media's tendency to compare any recount to the "butterfly ballots and hanging chads" made famous during Florida's 2000 recount, and to breathlessly report the merest rumor of impropriety, is not merely lazy and absurd and sensationalist. It is also dangerous. It causes people to be frightened and concerned about all recounts -- to be wary of the very concept of recounts. But recounts needn't be like the "debacle" of 2000; in fact, they rarely are. They are far more frequently the best way to ensure that errors in counting do not result in the candidate who received fewer votes taking office. (Indeed, in 2004, a manual recount in the Washington governor's race reversed the results of the initial Election Day tabulations and machine recount.) Sensational and baseless reporting like that produced this week by NBC and The New York Times runs the risk of undermining public confidence in an essential part of the democratic process.
Jamison Foser is Executive Vice President at Media Matters for America.
Ugh, this is very discouraging. This kind of cheesy reporting in the NY Times shows what the real threat from cable 'news' and shabby blogging is: it is dragging down journalism everywhere. Does anyone doubt that the need to compete with a bottomless pit of sensationalist 'news' sources is driving the Times in this direction? We can say "Shame on them", but it's really shame on electorate and its short attention span, and even shorter memory.
The Bush administration's habitual abuse of power could have made for some pretty sensational reporting, but the Times was largely able to resist the temptation.
Totally true, steeve - did they think it wouldn't be sufficiently titillating or what??? I don't want to defend the Times, really, I'm just wondering where in hell (maybe other than here) we're supposed to look anymore for a reporter who can remember what a fact is.
Half the time I can't tell the difference between the news and Entertainment Tonight. This, of course, is intentional.
The solution? Toughen up our educational system. Start flunking kids out for stupidity and ignorance, In a generation or two, things will change for the better.
Until then, the Peter Principle will be our lord and master.
this is still one of the strangest stories of 2000, without an adequate explanation. it's the fact that a precinct in volusia county recorded a 16,000 negative vote, that's negative, for gore in the evening of election day. it's one of the reasons that the networks called florida for bush at that time, and then withdrew it. gore was actually going to concede to bush based on this "mistake", and then stopped his concession when it was straightened out. there was also another situation like this, with a smaller number of votes, several thousand, in nearby brevard county. you have to wonder if there were other situations involving two or three hundred votes where it did not show up. one of the best books on the recount is jeffrey toobin's "too close to call".
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0310/S00211.htm
I know of that story as well.... I seem to recall that it was Greg Palast that wrote about it?
Still... this and the Frankwn/Coleman elections are obvious examples of why we so desperately need four things to happen:
1) Get for-profit corporations out of the vote counting business!!! How any person can even consider this viable or in any way a good thing is beyond any rational thinking I'm aware of.
2) Every ballot in America, in every state, in every precinct that is used by every American needs to give out some kind of ballot receipt that is double checked by the voted before submission, a reciept that is hard copied, a small envelope is offered to seal it in, and perhaps a fine given to those that don't hold on to them (at least until the election is final or after any recounts?)
3) Make election days mandatory 'paid' holidays? Local elections on up, some kind of system can be done for each locality, but they would all be based on a national version?
4 Get for-profit corporations out of the vote counting business!!! How any person can even consider this viable or in any way a good thing is beyond any rational thinking I'm aware of.
Yes 1 and 4 are the same... this country will never be a truly free and open society as long we allow our votes to be in the hands of profit motivated partisans!
As for the media reporting in this way about MN.... anyone even remotly shocked by the revelation?
posted below also, i was replying here. palast wrote about it, as have others. i have and did read toobin's book. florida moved to an all paper trail this year, and the results were close to the polls.
I say make voting mandatory. Either vote or pay a penalty.
If an ID is required to vote, make it the government's job and not voter's to get the id.
And make sure every vote can be verified.
Again Foser is reduced to teaching kindergarten to millionaires. No doubt Foser is a brilliant intellectual, but we never get to see it because the media can't even get 2+2 right.
"It causes people to be frightened and concerned about all recounts" -- only if they watch the news. When cable news is on TV, everybody in the room becomes dumber.
Support higher education -- turn off the news.
They read MMFA. Trust me, they do.
Not to worry, if the recount favors the Republican, then recounts will become legitimate again and we should honor the result. Foser is always great with the facts and timelines, showing how these lazy reporters don't even bother to google simple facts from their stories (much less actual reporting), but guys like Hannity and Rush don't give a bloody dingo's kidney about the "facts"...they say whatever is politically expedient. They will even lie and drum up fear simply to hedge their bets and then turn around and say the opposite thing a week later. Until their listeners hold them accountable by changing the channel, then they will just lie lie lie.
It has been fairly obvious that they don't care much about who or how many listen, but only the ability to pump out the propagaanda. The only way to hold them accountable is with Broadcast licences. One to a customer with an accountability clause and a fairness doctrine is what is needed. Only that would have their slightest attention.
The single most significant thing so far, that the count and recount of Minnesota's U.S. Senate election has in common with Florida's 2000 presidential ballot, is the interference we see being attempted in that count and recount, by the so-called "national media" and by others too, who do not live in Minnesota and so therefore it's none of their freaking business.
It's Minnesota's election. It's their ballot. It's their count and it's their recount.
You think the People of Minnesota are too stupid to determine their own ballot?
You think someone outside of Minnesota, like the so-called "national media", needs to help those poor dopes in Minnesota out?
Again, that's the single thing right now, that Minnesota 2008 and Florida 2000 have in common: attempts by the "national media" and others, to interfere with their election, and interfere with the counting and recounting and ultimate Certification of their ballot.
That's just one of things that happened in Florida 2000.
The bottom line is, if Franken wins Media Matters will say justice prevailed and that the recount system worked Blah blah blah. If coleman wins the election was stolen and franken should sue the state blah blah blah.
Whoever is the eventual winner deal with it and move on.
Take heart, the MN election laws are some of the best in the nation.
The voting mechanisms are such that there is a hard copy paper record that can be used in this recount; the issues that arise when dealing with DRE systems will be minimized. The standard for judging "voter intent" directs the recount officials to be increadibly reasonable when looking at the ballots. The ballots are essentially giant scantron cards, like those you used in school when taking a standardized test, and the optical scan readers may not register your vote if you fail to completely fill in the circle, or register an overvote if you accidentally filled in one circle and crossed it out to mark the proper candidate. In these cases, per MN state law, the judges would be obligated to count the vote as the inent of the voter would be obvious.
As this recount progresses, and I am guessing, enters into what seem to be inevitable legal challenges, I would hope that we can take a hard look at the advantages that the system yields. In many other states, there is no paper record of your vote, the register for the DRE machines not withstanding. These things are so easy to tamper with, and there is no way of knowing that the auditable record of the machine is not comprimised. The hullabaloo over the allegation that an election judge forgot ballots in her car is moot, when you consider that the DRE machines are kept overnight at the homes of election judges, and have reportedly been spotted sitting in cars parked in public lots. All it takes is for someone to covertly switch the storage card (available online for about $90, takes a matter of minutes to swap) for the vote count to be hijacked, with no way of knowing what has taken place. The standards to determine voter intent vary from state to state, so it is truly a crapshoot that decides if your disputed vote would be allowed.
I do not say this in a partisan or ideological manner. I say this as an organizer who has spent the last several years trying to convince people that there remains a fair and judicious republic to care for and defend. Between the improprieties of 2000 and 2004, so many people have become resigned to the notion that even if they do become involved, there is only a chance that their vote will be counted. This cannot be the way America works, and the issue at hand is not one of identity or ideology...this is not the hallmark of a functioning democracy.
Please, become involved with the electoral system where you are. Write your Secretary of State, Board of Elections and Commissioners. Become a visible presence at meetings, introduce the issue of free and fair elections. Familiarize yourself with the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), understanding that participation in the electoral process is not a right, it is a responsibility, the most basic tenent of our civic duty.
http://www.fec.gov/hava/hava.htm
Not to absolve the media of their role in this, but this is all the product of the Coleman campaign (and the GOP's) efforts to generate this exact effect. As Media Matters has already seen, our republican governor Pawlenty will go on national TV and—in the same breath—say that there is no evidence of fraud or impropriety, but also claim that things are suspicious.
The GOP has played the local media like a fiddle in this way, giving voice to their baseless suspicions (making them supersitions in my book) and counting on them not to do the investigative work to dispel or confirm them. In the mean time, the honest and hard-working election officials who are committed to the integrity of Minnesota's election are smeared with innuendo. The poor elections director of Minneapols is getting calls from relatives asking her what she was doing with ballots in her car, when it never happened. These distortions and deceptions are not without a cost, and yet our own governor encourages them? Disgusting.
Everyone involved knows there is nothing fishy whatsoever, which is why after the recount is done, and even after the inevitable election challenge lawsuit, there will be no move to make substantial changes to Minnesota's election laws (except maybe to codify a specific method of securing ballots for consistency's sake).
So the media is complict in the Coleman/GOP scheme to create doubt where there is none. How they can't feel like utter tools and failures, I don't know. Their only job is to investigate and inform the public of facts; instead they're giving a platform for someone to announce a story idea that turns out to be nothing more than a supersitition.
As a daily subsriber to the NYT and not so coincidentally an admitted original supporter of the Iraq war I want to thank you Media Matters for addressing the half truths that seem to pervade our print and other medai. I think it really is laziness on the reporters part. They seem to settle on a narrative and are pained to deviate from that narrative. Convention wisdom says the print media is strained to the breaking point and that explains incomplete coverage. But this negates the incredible gains in technology that have benefited reporters. Anyway, that's my 2 cents.
The Today Show terminology (mess, debacle) is straight out of the Rove handbook. Establish chaos and blame the chaos on the normal process (ie the Florida/Minn recount). The MSM falls for it because a "mess" is a better story. Again, the Coleman camp "called" the election for themselves with no evidence, as Fox "called" Florida for Bush. The MSM joins the chorus because they let the propogandists do their work. They "report" on what the propograndists say as if it were objective reporting. Is there any doubt that the Rove strategy has been the biggest threat to the democracy and media fairness in the history of the nation?
The MSM falls for it because a "mess" is a better story.
No, the MSM falls for it because they are republican run. It really is that easy an explanation.
Yep, bias and stupidity are the only constants. Other explanations fail:
The media is deferent to authority -- but not when it would benefit democrats.
The media reports "he said she said" without making value judgments -- but not when it would benefit democrats
The media is sensationalistic -- but not when it would benefit democrats
The media favors those who treat them well -- but not when it would benefit democrats
The media is just after ratings -- but not when it would benefit democrats
The media pushes the corporate agenda -- but not when it would benefit democrats
The media is intensely stupid -- even if it benefits democrats.
If the Senate races start to fall in favor of democratic candidates in the current races, I expect these talking voices to go up so far in frequency, that only dogs, bats and whales will be able tp hear them.
"If the Senate races start to fall in favor of democratic candidates in the current races, I expect these talking voices to go up so far in frequency, that only dogs, bats and whales will be able tp hear them."
And wouldn't that be wonderful for everyone but the aforementioned dogs, bats and whales?
Some say its all part of a nefarious liberal plot to spread the pain arround. I counter that the Supreme Court has signed off on torturing whales. I'm sure they'll get onboard similar treatment to dogs and bats. Pre-emptive animal torture, thats part of the shrub doctrine right?
palast also wrote about it, as have others. i have toobin's book. florida moved to an all paper trail this year, and the results were close to the polls.