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Saturday, October 1, 2005

Seattle Times V. The Facts

Posted by on October 1 at 12:25 PM

The Seattle Times bends over backwards today (and ignores the facts) to spin the “write-in” phenomenon in the monorail board primary election vote as a sign of an anti-monorail sentiment.

Under the headline “Thousands of Voters Vented, Poked Fun at Monorail Mess” the Seattle Times writes:

Inspired by the stumbling Seattle Monorail Project, which has been collecting millions of dollars a month, thousands of voters bypassed the candidates listed on the September primary ballot. They preferred to suggest their own. Kill the Monorail, Waste of Money and Close it Down were the candidates of choice for some of Seattle’s more frustrated monorail watchers. One voter used a four-letter word to say what ought to be done with the troubled project.

But the facts upend the Seattle Times’s claim: Of the two monorail board elections, one race tallied a normal 1 percent write-in rate (exactly the same as the mayor’s race) and one tallied a stunning 4.47 percent write in rate. Hmmm? Well get this: In the race with the notable write-in percentage (4.47 as opposed to 1 ), the Stranger had recommended a write-in vote: Pro-Monorail star Peter Sherwin. So, if anything, the story here is that a whopping 3,662 people went with the write-in choice in the race where the Stranger recommended writing-in a pro-monorail candidate. Indeed, in the other race, only 900 people opted for the write-in slot.

In the Stranger this week, I wrote that the Seattle Times turns any monorail news into bad news. They proved it again today by running a front-page story that spins the Stranger’s, evidently successful pro-monorail write-in campaign as somehow reflecting an anti-monorail vote. (The Seattle Times article does mention our write-in campaign, but only in passing at the end of their article—after they’ve already made their point. And they fail to mention the huge difference in the number of write-in votes in the two different monorail board races.)

There’s no question that the monorail may go down in November, but the Seattle Times should wait until that happens before making claims about the voters’ anti-monorail mood. Milking negative front-page headlines out of facts that indicate otherwise is an example of the Seattle Times biased reporting on the monorail. (Hey, Lord knows there’s nothing wrong with biased monorail reporting. But the Seattle Times should stop pretending to be “objective.” )