Hacks in the Stranger
By No, it’s not another interminable Hegel-obsesssed film review by Charles Mudede. It’s in the news section, where The Stranger occasionally pulls it together to offer a quality product. I’ve got nothing against The Stranger giving some column inches to a conservative; in fact, I think it might be a good idea. But I simply can’t endorse the decision to hire Stefan Sharkansky to write about the gubernatorial election controversy here in Washington (see here). The column itself is unremarkable; Sharkansky focuses on the normal discrepency between the initial number of identified voters and the voting tallies, which is perfectly commonplace and occurs regularly in other elections and did occur (although you’d never know if from Sharkansky’s column) in other counties as well. The point isn’t the particular line of reasoning in the column, though–it’s the very idea of hiring him to write on this issue.
During the recounts, as county numbers were trickling in, I was a regular reader of Sharkansky’s blog, Soundpolitics. I became a regular reader becuase Sharkansky was all over the new data as it came in county by county, and he built these cool tables that used the new data to update his predictions on the likely outcome based on existing data. His commentary, on the other hand, was another matter. Every time King County did anything, he tended to assert or imply this was part and parcel of their attempt to “steal” the election. (I can’t stress how ridiculous this is. If KC were intent on tipping the election for Gregoire, they really couldn’t have done a worse job. Not counting 735 votes the first two counts that tipped the scales for Gregoire? Worst. Election Fraud. Ever.) It was an unbecoming display of paranoia and/or hackery that only worsened after Rossi’s loss. He flogged conspiracy theories about voting roll discrepencies without making note of the perfectly plausible and non-nefarious explanations. He ignored circumstantial evidence of discrepencies that tended to favor Rossi. I could go on, but instead, I’ll simply point you to a month-old David Neiwart post at Ornicus that covers all this very well.
Sharkansky has the whole “the party left me” former Democrat schtick going for him, but I understand he’s moderate and reasonable on many issues. I would have no particular objection to The Stranger hiring him to write about almost any other subject. But on this election, he’s demonstrated an enthusiastic willingness to play a leading role in our local version of the Republican noise machine game, and if I were editing a news section, that alone would disqualify him from writing on the subject.