Big White Lie

Yesterday afternoon NPR's Michelle Norris reported on Florida s latest moves to rescind parts of its laws stripping felons of their voting rights. This report was remarkable for what went unsaid. First, no mention was ever given to the role that felon disenfranchisement played in the Jim Crow south. Secondly, and perhaps even more shocking, is that there was not one reference made to the pivotal role of fraudulent felon disenfranchisement carried out in Florida (as noted in The Nation, Mother Jones, Salon.com, and the AP) during the stolen election of 2000 which put George Bush in the White House. It's a stunning omission. It would be like reporting on Army Corps of Engineers flood projects without mentioning the debacle of the levee failures in New Orleans.

I thought perhaps that I was being a bit hard on NPR and that maybe they had given coverage to the fraud of the Florida "scrub lists" in the election of 2000, but if you search "DBT" (the company that carried out the scam) on NPR's website you get NOTHING! If you search "Database Technology" (the full name of the company) you do get ONE decent report by Phillip Martin from December 2000--but there is nothing else, no follow up whatsoever.