Media Bias, Voter Registration and My Old Journalism Prof

'The number of "inactive" voters is staggering.'

That's a standalone, unattributed one-paragraph sentence in a supposed news story about inactive voters.

I say "supposed" because a paragraph like that has no business in a news story. My old journalism professor would jump down our throats about every adjective we put into a story. Staggering? I can hear him in my head thirty years later in his thick Australian accent, "Staggering? Says who? The people aren't paying to read what you think! They're paying you to report the facts! I don't recall being literally staggered when I read your story! If you're going to make a claim like that you have to attribute it! This isn't the editorial page!"

On to the merits of this "staggering" claim. The reporter gives the number of inactive voters in the U.S. at nearly 21 million according to the Census Bureau. The over-18 population of the U.S., according to the Census Bureau numbers for 2011, was 237,744,633. So, about 8.8% of the adult population is marked inactive on the voter rolls.

Color me not staggered. We have not had a voter turnout for a Presidential election that tops 60% of the voting-age population since the Nixon-McGovern election in 1968. If more than 40% of the voting-age population does not even turn out to vote, then eight percent being marked inactive seems precisely the opposite of "staggering" to me.

Marking voters who have not voted in many years as inactive is a very long-standing practice and I was unaware that it was in any way controversial. So what suddenly made this a controversy worth reporting on?

Ahh. You have to read between the lines. And I found the proper lines to read between are down between the 7th and 8th paragraphs:

Critics charge that the "inactive voter" lists across the country have led to the unfair removal of voters from the voting rolls. They have branded the process vote "purging."

"Inactive voter lists really place the onus on voters, to figure out what their voter registration status is," laments Ryan Haygood, director of political participation at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

Horror! Voters having to take responsibility for their own registration status? What's next, people having to provide for their own food and housing? What are we coming to?

I'd be willing to lay money that the reporter, named, um ... hey, there's not a byline! Odd. Oh, at the bottom it says "Fox News' Kathleen Foster contributed to this report." Really? You know when media outlets give a "contributed" credit instead of a full byline? They do it when not enough of the text is the reporters' own to qualify the story as her own work. So, as I was saying, this story is almost certainly a re-write of a press release from some activist organization attempting to turn an ordinary and long-standing facet of election law into a "controversy." Probably the NAACP in this case.

And that's how special interests hijack the news. Even though the reporter went to the trouble of getting opposing quotes, she (or the unattributed press release author) editorialized in the middle of the story and contributed to a biased atmosphere by actually allowing herself to be led by the nose to turn this into a story by some group's PR department. It doesn't matter to the group that originated the story that she included alternate viewpoints. The key thing is that they got a story in one of the nation's top news outlets.

Just by getting the story to print, they win by setting the public perception that there is an actual controversy. The reader thinks "Why would Fox print the story if there wasn't a controversy?" How did Fox know there was a controversy? Why, they were told so by the group trying to create a controversy!

Are there actual hordes of angry would-be voters complaining that they are unable to vote when they want to? No, that doesn't exist. There are only the imagined disenfranchised. Then number of lazy half-interested voters who don't bother to turn up to the polls in half a decade, don't bother to confirm their registration after that gap, and find out too late that they're no longer registered to vote, is miniscule, and they are precisely the opposite of the type to form a political activist organization to do something about it. They're more the "Oh, crap. Oh well, maybe next time." types. No, this "controversy" is generated by entirely more active and motivated types on behalf of those poor down-trodden who didn't bother to notice that they ought to be outraged.

We are awash in these "top-down" controversies. Things become "controversial" because a very small group of well-funded, committed activists say they are, and the reporters, desperate for easily-generated news copy, eat it up. Going out and doing the work of finding out how many people are actually turned away at the polls would have been hard. Rewriting a press release then calling up a few government officials for quotes was easy. Thanks, Ms. Foster, you've done your bit to further the demise of actual journalism. You can go home now.