Apparently, the third rail of political reporting

As some of you may be aware, Robert Koehler wrote a great article for Tribune Media Services called The silent scream of numbers, detailing the reasons to suspect foul play in the 2004 election. What you may not know is that that article, and a later one on a similar theme, were not picked up by many papers that normally carry his work. His latest column, Citizens in the rain, has actually been spiked by TMS itself.

Perhaps the most annoying item in this story is the fact that The Chicago Tribune, which does not run Koehler's column, nevertheless attempted a rebuttal, neatly missing the point and of course re-writing history to claim that Richard Nixon set "a moral example" by not contesting his loss in 1960. (In the real world, Nixon did contest one state for weeks. He didn't contest Illinois because his own party's shenanigans in the southern part of the state couldn't bear scrutiny.)

The corporate media keeps pretending that this is all about overturning the election and refusing to accept defeat. They just don't seem to get it that it's democracy's loss, not Kerry's, that's at issue here.

Look, we have an election result we cannot verify. That's unacceptable. Among other things, it means we can't know that any future elections will be honest - unless we stop this business now, before those future elections take place.

Bradblog has the story, and an update noting that Editor & Publisher has run an article about it.

(No, I don't know why this post originally appeared with a 12:12 PM timestamp and therefore jumped below earlier posts. I fixed it. Hope not too many of you fell through the time warp....)