An Open Letter to the New York Times (and by implication) the Rest of the US Media Who are Trying to Whitewash the 2004 Presidential Election Scandal
by LILIAN FRIEDBERG
Dear New York Times, etal,
As a long-time subscribed reader of your publication""one I have always staunchly defended one of the best in the world--I am incensed by your dismissive handling of what is one of the most significant breaking news stories since Watergate.(your Nov.12 article,Vote Fraud Theories, Spread by Blogs, Are Quickly Buried)
Here I am, seated at my computer, submerged in the nefarious bowels
of the internet""reading a New York Times article with all the
"twitchy cloak-and-dagger thrust" of booking an airline ticket,
making a hotel reservation, a bank transfer or reading the Washington
Post, Atlantic, New Yorker, ABC, NBC, and CBS headlines""things most
of us do on a regular basis in the "parallel universe" that is the
internet (citing another derogatory and patently absurd quip by NBC
News' Chip Reid).
I am neither internet enthusiast nor blogger: the term blogosphere did
not even enter my vocabulary until several weeks before the 2004
election when these citizen journalists, some more legitimate than
others, began emerging as a powerful political force in the election.
I am not unlike most of your readers: educator, writer, editor,
translator with a PhD and a two-page publications list under my belt,
in German and English. I volunteer for my local park district, where I
offer performing arts programs for children and youth. All in all,
I'm pretty average""not unlike the now nearly 40,000 people
who've signed the electronic petition to Congress requesting an
investigation of the 2004 presidential election. (Note: I do not argue
for the legitimacy of all these signatures""what's a few thousand
plus or minus in the greater scheme of things?). The internet is not a
distant planet: I would venture to guess that it is "inhabited" or
at least visited by 99.9% of your readers.
These readers don't appreciate their entirely justifiable concerns
about the accuracy of the electoral process being discredited and
dismissed as conspiracy theorist-quackery and subsequently buried by
the press""as eight of nine responses printed in today's edition
evidence.
One glaring omission in your coverage involves the way this story
began: you claim that it emerged from the ether "in the course of
seven days" as mysteriously as the creationist version of human
evolution. But that is not the case.
So how did thousands of Times' readers get swept up in the maelstrom
of the "online market of dark ideas surrounding the last week's
presidential election"? What really happened to spawn the internet
hysteria?
The stage was set on November 3, with worldwide shock and disbelief
over Bush's "overnight sensation" victory: observers throughout
the country and the world who had been following the election closely
tucked themselves into bed Tuesday night confident that "help was on
the way." This logical assumption was based not only on early exit
polls: it was based on the worldwide public perception, particularly
salient in the United States, that the only way a Republican victory
could be secured was through a dubious fiat similar to the one we
witnessed in 2000. As one astute reader responding to your front-page
coverage of this highly significant media event succinctly stated:
"If George W. Bush had won the 2000 election honestly, people would
not be so quick to assume that he did not win this one fair and square
either." Of course, that was in the letters section, A30.
Fortunately for us, a few faithful poll hawk-heroes decided to tough
it out till morning, when we all woke up to the American Nightmare.
Years before the election""perhaps it was with the quiet passage of
the 2002 Help America Vote Act which mandated the use of Diebold and
ES&S machines notorious for their "tamperability"--concerned
citizens from various walks of life--professors, computer scientists,
systems analysts, even grandmothers and literary publicists from
Seattle--had been attempting to sound the alarm: the Diebold voting
machines are not secure; the democratic process itself is in jeopardy,
seriously so. Bev Harris, Executive Director of the consumer
protection organization Blackboxvoting.org first published her
groundbreaking book Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st
Century in 2003. Avi Rubin, professor of Computer Science at Johns
Hopkins University and Technical Director of the Hopkins Security
Information Security Institute subsequently published yet another
study. Rubin is a qualified expert with years of practical experience
in the fields of cryptography, network security, Web security and
secure Internet services who was employed by such companies as
AT&T and Bellcore prior to accepting his appointment at Johns
Hopkins. On Wednesday, October 27, 2004""one week before the
election, CBS's 60 Minutes broadcast an alarming segment covering
electronic voting, featuring not only Rubin, but David Jefferson of
the Center for Applied Scientific Computing at Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory. Jefferson described the system currently in place
as the "electoral weapon of mass destruction" which could easily
be manipulated by a "rogue programmer." Mark Crispin Miller,
professor of media studies at New York University and author of
several "legitimate" books on American government published by
Norton & Company, also pointed out the potential for problems with
the machine-voting systems""and these are but a few of the
"minority report-esque" voices who attempted to sound the alarm
before the most recent election scandal broke loose on the internet.
Are we to discredit these experts as "internet conspiracy
theorists"?
In the hours since you posted your disparaging report, the bloggers
have lashed back faster than you could flog them: As Joseph Cannon's
Friday blog points out, even as you discount the "early" reports
that began appearing just two days after the election, you neglect to
take into consideration Dr. Stephen F. Freeman's (University of
Pennsylvania; degree: MIT) study published on November 10, which""two
days prior to your biased and poorly researched report""lent credence
to the bloggers' "conspiracy theories." Instead, you invoke the
imprimatur of Harvard, Cornell and Stanford, citing an email by three
unnamed political scientists posted to the website ustogether.org (a
study that has since been revised and is now being referred to in the
scientific community as the Dopp and Liddle report). According to your
account, there was not sufficient "concrete support" to merit the
GAO investigations sought by three Congressmen John Conyers. Jerrold
Nadler and Robert Wexler. The "Dixiecrat" theory has, in fact,
since been challenged by solid research findings, not by anonymous
emails shot off from prestigious schools. At present, the three
primary studies circulating on the net are the Dopp and Liddle report,
the Caltech report and the Freeman report""all of which are based on
statistical analyses of concrete data. Dr. Freeman's report
concludes that while "Systematic fraud or mistabulation is a
premature conclusion <. . .> the election's unexplained exit
poll discrepancies make it an unavoidable hypothesis, one that is the
responsibility of the media, academia, polling agencies, and the
public to investigate," and, furthermore, that, "as much as
we can say in social science that something is impossible, it is
impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote
counts in the three critical battleground states of the 2004 election
could have been due to chance or random error." Freeman concludes
that the odds of those exit poll statistical anomalies occurring by
chance are 250,000,000 to one.
These studies do not involve the kind of fuzzy math implied by the
Times' report of "blog-to-e-mail-to-blog"""they involve a
diligent, however frenzied, study of the actual data produced by exit
polls versus actual results. These so-called "internet conspiracy
theorists" are credentialed professionals engaged in hard
research--most of which is beyond my grasp as a classically
literary-minded PhD, but which clearly reflects solid research
conducted by people who, by virtue of their professional training in
precisely the fields required to analyze this data, are hard at work
doing the job of the entire nation right now. They are doing your job,
and they deserve your support and gratitude, not disdain, derision and
dismissal. The fact of the matter is, the situation we face as a
nation is far too complicated to be figured out without the aid of
sophisticated independent scientists who can analyze the data. The
jury is still out, but what we have to go on are three well-researched
statistical analyses that will need to be studied, compared and
analyzed by highly discerning and well-trained minds. That is likely
to take some time""considering what is at stake, we'd best just
hold our breath waiting for the research to be complete. In the
meantime, these three studies alone provide enough evidence of
"anomalies" to merit a thorough, time and cost intensive
investigation.
Let's not even begin to "discuss" or otherwise dismiss the most
recent findings of investigative journalist Greg Palast, one of those
internet-conspiracy-theorist-bloggers charged with snowballing rumors
in cyberspace: in his BBC report (also available online) he states
that "documents from the Bush campaign's Florida HQ suggest a plan
to disrupt voting in African-American districts." Is it the BBC that
is spreading rumors, or Germany's highly regarded Spiegel (also
available online), which rightly identifies Palast as an
"investigative reporter, documentary film producer and best-selling
author" and the remaining "internet conspiracy theorists" as
"watchdog groups" (in most democracies, this is a positive
moniker, not a pejorative).
I must confess, Mssrs. Zeller, Fessenden and Schwartz, in my
professional capacity as a translator of German historical and
literary texts, I often have the unpleasant task of researching
"internet conspiracy theories" and subjecting myself to the
horrific rantings of stark-raving lunatics on the net. One classic
example can be found at this site: http://www.regmeister.net/verbrecher/verbrecher.htm
. This, sirs, is an "internet conspiracy theory"""the remaining
sources I have cited here are highly legitimate studies and reports
conducted by credentialed scientists and respectable journalists.
Had you done your research, you'd have recognized the difference.
Perhaps you got your internets confused: I see from today's
headlines that the "Pentagon
Envisioning a Costly Internet for War"""Tim Weiner reports that
"the Pentagon is building its own Internet, the military's world
wide web for the wars of the future. The goal is to give all American
commanders and troops a moving picture of all foreign enemies and
threats""a 'God's-eye view' of battle." Maybe that was the
internets you had in mind""I'm quite content with the God's
eye-view I'm getting right here and now on this ol' fashioned
democratic internet.
The story is bigger than Watergate. Your dismissal of it is on a par
with the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, and the collective
conspiracy on the part of the press to suppress it is tantamount to
nothing less than high treason.
MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and David Schuster are the only mainstream
media men with a shred of integrity left in their bones.
Sincerely yours,
Dr. Lilian Friedberg
Reporting from the Democratic Mandate of the United States of America
Lilian Friedberg friedberg@chidjembe.com is a writer, translator, editor and performing artist from Chicago, IL. She recently completed her PhD in Germanic Studies at the University of Illinois. Her work has appeared in such venues as American Indian Quarterly, African Studies Quarterly, German Quarterly, New German Critique, Denver Quarterly, Chicago Review, Transition and various other venues. She recently co-edited, with Sander Gilman, a volume of selected essays by German Jewish journalist Henryk Broder, (A Jew in the New Germany, Univ. of Illinois Press). Friedberg is artistic director of the Chicago Djembe Project, an arts organization dedicated to respect and cooperation across cultures and genders through the African djembe drum tradition. WWW.Chidjembe.com
also by Lilian Friedberg Election Results Challenge Our Faith in America and Its People
Add your comments below
