Censorship of studies documenting election fraud
from the afterword of Fooled Again by Mark Crispin Miller:
... all studies of Bush/Cheney’s bogus “re-election” slipped right down the memory hole. After Fooled Again had come and gone, much like the Conyers Report before it, several other works came out, corroborating both this book and Conyers’s findings—and therefore just as quickly vanishing, every writer having much the same experience as mine, or even worse. Because such works could not be honestly refuted, the next best way to stop them was to disappear them at the moment of their birth. Such universal silence is as sure a way to hide the truth as any bonfire or injunction.
So has Steve Freeman’s Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?: Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count, co-authored with Joel Bleifuss (editor-in-chief of In These Times), and published in June of 2006 by Seven Stories Press. The black-out on that book was even heavier than the night that fell on Fooled Again, and even more momentous than the black-out on Fitrakis’s work, which deals only with Ohio, while Freeman’s book contends that Kerry won the national race, by 5 million votes, perhaps, or even more—a victory that was (inadvertently) revealed by the national exit polls. The exit polls—all exit polls—were then dismissed as “unreliable,” at least in the United States (although not in Ukraine). Thus have the facts about those exit polls, and exit polling generally, become illegible behind the fog of propa¬ganda long since settled over them. Freeman clears the air, carefully disen¬tangling fact from fiction, thereby demonstrating that those exit polls were evidently sound, and that there were, in fact, no valid arguments against them.
If there are any valid arguments against that book, they are so far unknown. Other than some passing shots fired in a New York Times review some six months after Freeman’s book was published, there have, as of this writing, been no national reviews of it—in fact, no print reviews at all—nor any network radio or TV interviews with either author. Freeman taped an interview with Terry Gross for NPR’s “Fresh Air,” but it was never broadcast. Thus was Freeman’s study disappeared as he himself had been just after the 2004 election. As he notes in the preface, soon after Kerry’s “loss” the author’s qualms about the vote-count sparked the interest of reporters, and yet no coverage ever came of it. Freeman’s interviews with the Washington Post and USA Today did not see print, and his interview on CNN was never aired. His scheduled interview on MSNBC was cancelled, because, they said, the jury in Scott Peterson’s murder trial had reached a verdict, but they had no interest in rescheduling.
Such treatment would be understandable if Freeman, Bleifuss and the Seven Stories Press were all completely out to lunch; but in that case their thesis should have been demolished in the public interest. In any case, that lucid work has been extolled by experts of considerable standing—mathematician John Allen Paulos, political scientists Lance DeHaven-Smith, Jack Nagel and Kenneth Warren, technology consultant Bruce O’Dell, public opinion expert Michael X. Delli Carpini, Dean of the Annenberg School of Communi¬cation, et al. Without a fair and cogent counter-argument, we must conclude that Freeman’s argument adds up, while the refusal to discuss it makes no sense.
This happened several months after we tried to get WHYY-FM in Philadelphia, Gross’s station, to run ads for Fooled Again. When they refused to do it, Josh Mitteldorf, the local activist who was negotiating with the station, urged Tim Roll, to consider an alternative idea. Roll’s response was startling. “I suggested to him,” writes Mitteldorf, “that Steve Freeman's book on a similar theme would be coming out in the near future, and I might approach them again with an ad for that book. He replied that they couldn't accept ads for just any book - and raised the analogy of Mein Kampf !” Email from Josh Mitteldorf, 1/9/06.
