Left-of-center Seattle blog prints misleading article on vote count

by Bryan Myrick

Call in the paramedics. There was a possible Kool-Aid overdose at Publicola—Seattle’s left-of-center blog—this morning when Erica C. Barnett posted the following in an item on the race for King County Executive. [Emphasis added.]

While everybody was busy watching the mayor’s race, some potentially great news for King County Executive candidate Dow Constantine from yesterday’s ballot drop got overlooked: Despite the fact that Susan Hutchison has 36 percent of the vote so far (to Constantine’s 23 percent), the latest results actually show Constantine coming in ahead of Hutchison—with 28.74 percent to Hutchison’s 28.20 percent, about 180 votes.

Huh? For those of you wondering, the real vote count, as of 4:23 p.m. Thursday, was as follows:

You can confirm the results yourself at the King County Elections results page, in case you have lost faith in the print, electronic, and now digital, media.

Maybe I’m being picky about the written word, because I know that she meant to say that Constantine came on strong late in the primary. It’s something I wrote about yesterday, albeit without being aware of the $41,000 Service Employees International Union (SEIU) expenditure for a mass mailing on Constantine’s behalf, according to McCarren.

Comments made to the post conveyed a great deal of reader confusion, and despite an update posted containing a response from Hutchison’s campaign manager, Jordan McCarren, to Barnett’s suggestion that Constantine had momentum, no clarification was made on the topic of Barnett’s phrasing.

How much mind-reading would readers have to be capable of in order not to be misled into believing that Hutchison and Constantine are in a neck-and-neck dogfight, separated by only “about 180 votes.”

A second and more important question might be, why is Publicola even reporting on the race when one of the site’s staffers is also an official in the Dow Constantine for King County Executive campaign?

Saundeep Kaushik is both Constantine’s media coordinator and Publicola’s “spiritual adviser,” as the site’s staff list brags. Clearly there is a huge conflict of interest within that association, but I guess that just means that Publicola’s readers will responsibly look elsewhere for the balanced, credible reporting they are going to need to inform themselves about the proposals of two very different candidates.

Disregarding for a moment Publicola’s “tight” relationship with the Constantine campaign, did Barnett’s journalistic standards float away like incense smoke when she left the The Stranger?  Even though her pen was sharpest among all of Seattle’s newspapers where Hutchison has been concerned (“Closet Case: Susan Hutchison Can Run, But She Can’t Hide” April 16, 2009 The Stranger), there are still standards of clarity and fairness that transcend any partisan axe she may be grinding. A blog that was only recently bragging about an infusion of cash and its ability to produce high quality journalistic content should do a better job of protecting its integrity. If they were even the megablog daily that The Seattle Post-Intelligence has become they would be printing a lengthy clarification.

Publicola should take the appropriate step to cleanse it journalistic karma by putting a buffer zone between Kaushik and their editing and writing staff. At least then when the hit pieces against Hutchison come, their readers will know the Constantine campaign wasn’t typing and approving the stories.

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