The ethical corruption of our national new media has extended to a degree that once would have seemed unimaginable.  We were exposed to yet another remarkable example with the reporting on the long-awaited audit of the 2020 presidential election results in Arizona.

Widespread election fraud had been suspected in Maricopa County, the largest in the state, and the state Legislature authorized a thorough forensic investigation.  A draft of the election report was leaked to the press last week, and every news outlet quickly released selectively chosen details.  The message was straightforward.  The audit proved that Joe Biden had actually won the state's presidential election by even more than originally reported and thoroughly discredited charges of election fraud.

While the audit did find that a hand-recount of all of the original ballots did widen Joe Biden's margin by several hundred votes, the press deliberately and steadfastly ignored and left unreported the most critical results of the draft audit.  Included among those original ballots, the most comprehensive election audit ever conducted established the following:

• More than 23,000 mail-in votes were cast under voter IDs from people who should not have received their ballots by mail because they had moved.
• More than 10,000 voters cast ballots in more than one county.
• More than 9,000 mail-in ballots were returned and counted than had been mailed out of registered voters.
• Thousands of official results did not match those who voted, and thousands more were cast in-person in the name of those who had moved out of state.
• Logs and data files related to the election had been deliberately erased from the Election Management System (EMS) server, in violation of the law.
• Thousands of original ballots were duplicated more than once.
• Auditors were never provided with the required chain-of-custody documentation for the ballots, causing increased ambiguity regarding the accuracy of the election results.
• None of the various systems related to the election had numbers that would balance and agree with one another.
• Maricopa County officials actively interfered with the audit, withheld subpoena items, and refused to answer questions that are normally standard in such audits.

These and innumerable other irregularities were clearly identified and discussed in detail throughout the 114-page draft audit, but the mainstream press focused on a single paragraph that reported a slight difference in the hand recount of the original ballots that included a large number of apparently fraudulently cast votes.

Details of the audit will be sent to the Arizona attorney general for a possible criminal prosecution, and a number of recommendations are on the way to the state Legislature seeking laws to eliminate widespread election fraud.  The purpose of the forensic audit was not to overturn the 2020 election but to prevent future election corruption that was rampant in Maricopa County and elsewhere last year.  The news media reported none of this.

In 2000, the presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore was extended for weeks by seven Democrat appointees on the rogue Florida Supreme Court.  And the media, which had done all they could to manipulate the reporting on Election Day by falsely declaring the swing state's outcome, desperately stayed on in hopes of finding proof their candidate should have won.

A consortium of a dozen major news outlets spent more than a million dollars and a year of effort only to reluctantly concede that Bush had won after all.  But twenty years later, the same companies had not the slightest interest to investigate innumerable reports of election fraud nationwide, while ridiculing all those who wanted to find out what really happened.

The performance of the press was shameful twenty years ago.  It is repugnant now.

Image: Tom Arthur via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.

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