“There is a growing militant, far-right, Christian nationalist movement that is being fueled by online disinformation…,” so writes Denver Riggleman, a former US Congressman and member of the Freedom Caucus in his book, The Breach: The Untold Story of the Investigation into January 6. Alone in Congress speaking out against QAnon conspiracies he further explained, “That movement now constitutes an extremist wing of the Republican Party-the party I once belonged to-and it poses a serious danger to our democracy.”
A former military intelligence officer and trained not to draw conclusions before gathering provable and tangible data, Riggleman’s book discusses the risks to a healthy and functioning democracy when the polity are making voting decisions based upon fantastical and provably false conspiracies and election fantasies. Riggleman’s data collection and research focus on digital footprints, meta data, ip addresses, cell phone dumps, social media tracking and much more compiled into databases that can be sorted, filtered, and analyzed to reach logical conclusions.
The rest of us, however, rely upon the media to make educated and informed choices.
So, when local media, The World newspaper for example, mindlessly publishes verbatim a press release written by the “extremist wing” referenced above or wrongly declares a victory in an election that is yet to be certified as it did today, our ability to make informed choices is deeply impaired.
The Coos County Clerk released a “Final Unofficial Totals Report” on November 21 showing Rod Taylor leading Melissa Cribbins by 152 votes in the race for Coos County Commission. When reporter David Rupkalvis was alerted to the fact that Taylor had not, in fact, been certified the winner pending hundreds of still uncounted ballots, he insisted the report was titled “Final Totals Report”, ignoring the ‘unofficial’ and stands by his faulty reporting.
In a November 25, story entitled Final county election results delayed” again Rupkalvis falsely reported there were 1200 votes outstanding without bothering to confirm those figures with the clerk’s office. The clerk has confirmed via email The World exaggerated the number of outstanding votes but has confirmed there are sufficient votes remaining that Cribbins could still win the election.
How many people that read this bad reporting may have planned to cure there unconfirmed ballots by today’s 5PM deadline and changed their minds? Democracy cannot withstand this kind of carelessness.
