We think of Stewart as "one of us," and his wit has speared many a sacred cow. But while Mark was waiting backstage, one of the handlers instructed him not to say anything about election theft.
So, no - it has not gotten better. By direct censorship and indirect peer pressure and self-censorship, by some means that I understand and many that I don't understand, our press has become very docile. Election theft in America is just one of the subjects they will not touch.
JB: So, mainstream media discussion of election theft is clearly taboo. But not for you and your election integrity colleagues. How did you decide on the structure of your series? Give us a sense of what went in where and what got left out and why.
JM: As part of my day job, I write a blog for ScienceBlog.com. Ben Sullivan, who runs that site, had read some of my election writings, and invited me to submit a piece on election theft for Science Blog last month. I leapt at the opportunity to reach a new audience, so I assumed nothing about political attitudes of the reader, as I certainly would have if it had been originally for OpEdNews. I wanted to keep the article factual, to start at the beginning and summarize the empirical grounds for believing our elections are being stolen.
I got carried away, and by the time I was done I had written 6000 words, mostly off the top of my head, and later went back and filled in links and references. This was much too long for ScienceBlog's format, so I made it a series.
Ben was pleased with the articles, and told me it gave him a new sense of just how corrupt our system is. But when it came to the stories about how Ohio was stolen for GW Bush, and how Clint Curtis was hired to write software to manually alter the numbers in a DRE voting machine, he lost his nerve, and didn't want to risk putting the articles on ScienceBlog. The compromise that he and I worked out was to publish the first two parts on Science Blog and then include a link to the rest on OEN.
For me, the moral of the story is that it is very difficult to bring people into a new reality. Scientists are supposed to be trained skeptics, but in practice they often make the mistake of assuming that cheating and foul play in the political world is on the same level as it is in science...and of course, cheating in politics is far more rampant than in science. (And there's plenty of unfairness in science.)
JB: I don't know much about cheating in science but I'm sure you were disappointed about Ben's limited response. Was he more afraid of losing credibility or was it that he couldn't believe it himself? Here's your opportunity, Josh. Let's reprise those two stories - Ohio and Clint Curtis - for OpEdNews readers, who for years have had access to our coverage of the varied forms of election theft.
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