This is what print media, in the form of Tampa Times, does to the issue of rigged, or botched elections.
What you're seeing is the follow-up to the unanswered questions about the thoroughly flubbed election in Pinellas County last Tuesday during the primary.
Recap: 36,000 ballots failed to download, so workers and volunteers drove memory sticks around in their personal vehicles then voted these ballots themselves back at the office. No chain of custody to speak of.
This burnt offering....this, is story number three for Tampa Times.
Back in the day when I was in newsprint this was called filling a 1 by 4 news hole: a one column story, four inches long. A news brief, in my day. You wouldn't even put your byline to it. A press release.
When editors give you an assignment that even they don't want covered, but they feel the need to anyway - in this case because some underwear blogger is putting the screws to them and raising a stink down at the county commission - they give it a "news hole" like this. Then, when the reporter has done her best with perhaps eight column inches they have given here, the editors cite a new ad purchase, hack the hole in half again, and then tell her to boil down the language for space, or "simplify it" more for mass consumption.
The resultant has little if any news value. It's not really the reporter's fault. She's being told how far she can go with this story. The editors are then pretending the story itself is unworthy of more investigation when balanced against the need of a dealership to sell more Chevies; even though they know they are lying to themselves and their colleagues. Even though they know what they are doing is the height of hypocrisy and pants-pissing intellectual cowardice.
I drove by the Tampa Times building en route to Pinellas County to look into this glitch. The Tampa Times building appeared to be every bit of 15 stories tall. Call it 350,000 square feet of space? Maybe 400 employees in the building when I drove by it? Just guessing here having seen the building from 275 in the rain.
I spent $60 round trip Tuesday, ten hours of my life without pay. Three hours there, three hours back, three hours boots-on-the-ground driving around Pinellas County. One hour lost in the pouring rain from Clearwater to Largo.
This is the best they can do with a story of such importance with all their resources at their disposal? This while other people spend their own time and money bird-dogging, and doing their jobs for them?
For over a year, I have begged, pleaded with their editors to look into the rigged voting situation in Hillsborough; not for me, but for my son.
He's 16. Every time I see him in his JMCROTC uniform, I get a tinge of fear in my guts. I know I don't want Mitt Romney to be my president because he hasn't the slightest hesitation toward reinstating the draft and sending my son into the worst of it in Iran, just to please the Koch puppet masters. He'll make damned sure his own boys don't have to go, of course. He'll make sure of that, the self-interested swine that he is.
But there is even - if you can imagine it - something worse at stake here. If corporations and shadowy intelligence operatives, and political dynasties can now purchase with impunity the actual vote, ( not the laws shortening early voting, not unlimited ad budgets) but the actual votes by extortion and bribes inside the offices of elections supervisors; if they can get away with murder in order to make room for willing accomplices; if they can silence the Florida Department of Law Enforcement; if they can purchase silent inactivity from the US Department of Justice; if they can install governors from the clay of seedy corporate criminals; if they can bribe and intimidate editors and publishers, and now actually just buy an election result outright, then we have truly lost this country. And they will find another way to kill or enslave my family eventually.. You can bet they will hide them and theirs when the bombs fall on us; swine that they are. Of that you can be sure.
Back in the day when I worked in newsprint, if we heard one of our own had been invited to join The St Petersberg Times also known as "St. Pete Times" we were impressed and envious. Here was someone who rated, someone who would now be free to pursue journalism for its own sake, for the value it added to a free society.
But those days are gone now. Just look at what they have done with this story. Those bygone days have given way to pants-pissing yellow cowardice on the part of editors and publishers. So too, in the newsrooms of major television stations and networks; so too, within radio: god-damned, pants-pissing, yellow, cowardice. Did you hear that, boys and girls? Did you hear what I just called you?
I just called you out: you, god-damned, pants-pissing coward. That's what I just said. And what are you going to do about it? You're not going to do a damned thing, that's what. Because you're a god damned, pants-pissing coward who hides in your corner office when real news comes your way. Send a young reporter off to do a job you know, you'll hack down to nothing.
How DARE you look in a mirror and call yourself a journalist. I blame you.... I blame you, for NOT doing your job; I blame you for NOT standing up. I blame YOU for what's happening to us.
When I started Rick Scott: Enemy of the State, and this blog, I promised myself I was going to behave in a more mercenary fashion than I had in the past. I thought publicize the ebook through activism, yes, but don't make a "calling," of this. Don't go Quixote. Have a business model, like everyone else.
But that has also gone out the window, entirely.
If this is a business model, it's not working. I am spending hundreds of dollars, thousands when you count lost wages, selling precious few books. I am a "micro-micro" publisher of the first order. Which is why I have repeatedly politely reached out to the likes of Adam Smith and Bill Varian at the Times, Christian Wade at the Tribune; other names; Brad Freidman, Pete Schorsch, Michael Bender, Ed Schultz, Rachel Maddow, Mike Papantonio, Thom Hartman.
Here, this news story is an exemplification of media pants-pissing cowardice run amok. I was in Tampa yesterday. I checked the Times news bin, as I do every time I am over there. I didn't see this item, anywhere, or anything like it. And it should have been on the front page of the A section.
There is every reason to suspect foul play in Pinellas, in Hillsborough and in other offices of supervisor of elections, throughout Florida. These glitches, make no sense. They indicate our systems are woefully inadequate at best. They indicate felonious election fraud at worst. The explanations never make any sense.
And the media stands there with their coward face and lets them pass for news in tiny little buried stories, that have as much impact as a wet fartlette from a shy debutant.
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