Mark Crispin Miller is arguably one of the finest progressive authors and thinkers of our time. Today, he wrote an open letter to the New York Times regarding their conspicuously nonexistant coverage of Wednesday's House Judiciary Committee hearings on Ohio voting irregularities. As always, Miller nailed it. Read the whole letter at Buzzflash. An excerpt:
And yet the New York Times, our nation's "newspaper of record," did not even mention it, much less cover it. The hearings were on Wednesday. There was no word of it in Thursday's paper, nor any word, belatedly, in Friday's. (Thursday's Times did run a couple of long stories on the electoral situation in Ukraine, but none on the quite similar, and -- to Americans -- vastly more important story here at home.)
Such silence is bizarre. It's deeply wrong. In fact, it's un-American. For what public issue could there be that matters quite as much as the integrity of our elections? What, then, could possibly explain, or excuse, the Times's failure even to note Conyers' hearings? For that matter, what explains the Times's thorough indifference to this crucial subject? Like all American news outlets, the Times is obligated, by the First Amendment, to attempt to keep its readership informed about the government, so that the government is answerable to us, its ultimate custodians. Rather than deal squarely with the ever-mounting evidence of massive fraud by the Republicans, the Times instead has merely ridiculed those raising questions, as if such patriotic citizens were laughably insane.
The hearings were one of very few shining moments of modern day American democracy. Watch the hearings here (RealVideo only). Try time index 1:17:00 for a stunning speech by John Bonifaz of the National Voting Rights Institute. If you haven't done so, buy a copy of either of Miller's books: Cruel and Unusual or The Bush Dyslexicon.