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The Silence of the Mainstream Media, Part 4 of Exclusive Series with Richard Hayes Phillips

Part 4 of Exclusive Series with Richard Hayes Phillips, Author of Witness to a Crime: A Citizens’ Audit of an American Election

By Joan Brunwasser, Voting Integrity Editor, OpEdNews

June 24, 2008

My fascination with this author is but a sidebar to the real story – how this important volume came this close to not getting published at all. And how, once again, the mainstream media has failed to do its traditional duty to the American people, to educate and inform.

A free press is a critical element in maintaining a healthy democracy. Our founding fathers knew it. That’s why the press enjoyed unique constitutional protection. One of the major functions of an emerging postal service was to distribute a myriad of newspapers and gazettes to American citizens. Thomas Jefferson wrote: “If it were left to me to decide whether we should have a government without a free press or a free press without a government, I would prefer the latter.” He and his cronies would be pulling out their hair over how the press has been so emasculated and co-opted, becoming little more than a mouthpiece for governmental policy and Big Business.

The “mainstream” media makes much of “the public’s right to know.” They chant this mantra in defense of even the most inappropriate invasions of privacy. But only the “alternative” media recognizes the public’s right to know that our elections are rigged.

To this day, the most comprehensive and well-documented article on the stolen 2004 election in Ohio, written by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was published in Rolling Stone magazine. My own voice has been heard on National Public Radio, but only once, when we filed in federal court to protect the ballots from destruction. The story made the Yahoo home page, and some of the major newspapers. That is as close as we have gotten to the mainstream.