“Man bites dog” in New England is still the stuff of breathless national coverage, always will be. Stories about dead wives in California also seem to merit wide coverage. But “Republicans convicted of election fraud” will always be local news. If it was spread wider, the people would be informed about the bigger picture.
So that’s why national media didn’t cover James Tobin’s trial while regional media did one heckuva job. Even though James Tobin was a top honcho in the
- National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee when he stepped in to corrupt the 2002
- Federal election, even though Tobin is or was employed by the top
- national-level Republican lobbying and PR group, even though Tobin went on from this 2002 event to become a top honcho (and a top donor) in the
- national 2004 Presidential campaign. And the Republican
- National Committee is paying Tobin’s legal bills.
Who remembers the expression, “Don’t make a federal case out of it”? As if, in those innocent days, a “federal case” was something that would get a lot of attention.
Neither Scott Peterson nor Michael Jackson threatened the basis of our democracy–the citizen’s right to vote in a fair election. I still can’t believe that what Tobin did–promoting a brand-new way to keep voters from voting–just didn’t matter to mainstream media.
Big thanks to Dave Winer, for linking to my outrage almost as soon as I posted it, and to other outraged bloggers OnePotMeal, Salon-blogger “A Blog Doesn’t Need a Clever Name,” KBCafe’s Bad Politics, for pushing this story.
Breaking: The Toledo Blade sees this as part of a national story.