Public interest in news topics beyond control of mainstream media

[cal04]

Associate Publisher: Public interest in news topics beyond control of mainstream media
The blogosphere has been abuzz. But in the days since Rolling Stone magazine published a long piece that accused Republicans of widespread and intentional cheating that affected the outcome of the last presidential election, the silence in America's establishment media has been deafening. In terms of bad news judgment, this could turn out to be the 2006 equivalent of the infamous "Downing Street memo," the London Times story that was initially greeted by the U.S. media with a collective yawn.

(snip)
To his credit, CNN's Wolf Blitzer aired a brief and not-very-illuminating interview with Kennedy late the next day after the Rolling Stone issue hit the newsstands. There was a brief mention on the Lou Dobbs report later that same evening and MSNBC got around to mentioning the article's assertions several days later. But for the most part, national and regional newspapers, the major networks and news services have behaved as if the article was never published, that it broke no new ground and there was nothing of interest or significance in it. Understandably, some readers are asking why. One Whidbey Island resident e-mailed the news editors of the P-I and The Seattle Times simultaneously, asking "Which one of you has the honesty and guts to investigate and report about the charges that Robert Kennedy Jr. has written about in regards to stolen 2004 presidential election?

"That someone could claim that our American electoral process was criminally thwarted should be BIG news."
P-I News Editor Gil Aegerter answered courteously, telling the reader he would pass his concerns along to our political coverage team. "In the meantime," Aegerter wrote, "I'll direct you to online coverage that the P-I has been doing on this issue, about the original Rolling Stone report and about reaction to it." Despite the critical tone in his note to Aegerter and his Times counterpart, our reader, and others who have similarly complained, are right.

(snip)

Those of us in what bloggers and Internet journalists derisively call "mainstream media" should have learned that lesson last year, when Internet-fueled curiosity about the "Downing Street memo" made us pay attention to a story we were too quick to dismiss as old news. Badly undervaluing the significance and the public's interest in the new disclosures, we thought former Bush administration officials, including ex-Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and White House counterterrorism aide Richard Clarke, had told us a year earlier that the administration had a predisposition for war with Iraq long before the attack, and long before diplomatic pressures had been exhausted. On hindsight, some of us realize now we should have recognized the newsworthiness of the secret memo and the 2002 meeting it chronicled, even if the report only provided corroboration of something we'd already heard.

KENNETH F. BUNTING
P-I ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/273283_bunting09.html

[struggle4progress]

1. "... discourse is rightfully in hands other than ours ..." !