Questioning the questioners

Back in August, On Our Radar linked to reporting on what seems to be the U.S. Justice Department's atrocious political prosecution of Alabama's ex-Gov. Don Siegelman, a rare popular Democrat there. Corporate media apparently has decided its news teams can't compete with Raw Story in reporting this news. The funny thing is, it's not even "investigative reporting," because the facts are all right there, so it's hard to digest why MSM has such a hard time ferreting out this remarkable news.

Now, a reader of Joe Cannon's Cannonfire blog anonymously posted he or she has inside knowledge of the case and made two claims that raised my eyebrows.

... (T)he three largest newspapers in his own state have been a big part of this conspiracy. The newspapers are owned by the media giant, Advance Publications Inc. Whose writers have (specific) orders on how to write news articles that involve Democrats. These newspapers are feeding this same false information to the AP Associated Press and the TV and radio media. ... I have requested that the FBI conduct an investigation of Advance Publications Inc.

The Newark Star-Ledger is an Advance company. I don't see any attributed source for the above claim, but at a minimum it raises a separate issue on media consolidation. If one company owns all the biggest news outlets in the state, only one corporate voice is making it to the outside traditional media via Associated Press wire service, which itself operates today without viable competition. The FCC will vote tomorrow on another disastrous foregone move to relax limits on corporations owning both newspapers and broadcast outlets with the same audiences.

Then this:

2002 election night. All the polls had reported in and Siegelman won by over 6,000 votes. Dan Gans, who had programming, computer system administration training and trained to work on the Diebold Election Systems Inc and the ES&S central voting tabulator, was about to be fired by Bob Riley when he decide to get online with Bay Minette located in Baldwin County, Al. He made several attempts to take votes from Siegelman’s total vote count and switch them to Riley’s; however, there was a third candidate that was running for governor that he forgot about. Gans had trouble making the total votes equal the number of voters that had voted.

Aren't Ocean County's voting machines counted on ES&S tabulators? I wonder if New Jersey Attorney General Anne Milgram, who is now scrutinizing voting machine company equipment to comply with a new law requiring paper proofs of each vote, is aware of this alleged vulnerability. I wonder if she has looked into how much of those companies' proprietary information might ever have been available to New Jersey election law experts, such as Angelo Genova and John Carbone. Carbone is the Republican lawyer Brick's GOP-controlled council hired to ensure Ocean County GOP boss George Gilmore would remain township attorney, and that town's political control flunks any smell test.

Just pondering food for thought. What do you think?