The result — bearing the unwieldy title of Mediaocracy 2000: Hail to the Thief: How the Media Stole the US Presidential Election — came out in Germany on January 19 through the efforts of the Media Channel’s Bonn-based partner, Media Tenor. Copies were distributed to delegates and journalists at the Davos World Economic Forum, in Switzerland.

But then Schechter started looking for a US publisher. And while quickie campaign books such as Jake Tapper’s Down and Dirty and Dana Milbank’s Smashmouth were coming out, Schechter was told to forget about it by publishers both large and small. “I think a lot of these people are out of touch,” says Schechter. “Like the Bush people, they want to move on.”

Mediaocracy is finally available, but you won’t find it in your bookstore. Rather, you can buy it on the Web from ElectronPress.com; for a $7 charge on your credit card, you can download a file and then print it out as a 151-page book. “We feel a little bit like Russian dissidents who had to publish their samizdat clandestinely,” quips Schechter.

Edited by Schechter and Media Tenor’s Roland Schatz, with a preface by WorldPaper editor-in-chief (and former Boston Globe columnist) Crocker Snow Jr., Mediaocracy, like most anthologies, is uneven. There’s a lot here about corporate media, Ralph Nader, and the networks’ two blown calls in Florida on Election Night. But the problem with analyzing the media’s campaign performance is that it can’t be separated from the collapse of politics as a serious enterprise. New York University’s Jay Rosen gets at the duality of this media-political dysfunction when he writes about the “vapid performance of the candidates,” “the poverty of press analysis,” and “a depressed culture of expectations for politics generally.” Yes, the media could do better, but so could a political system designed to eliminate worthy challengers such as John McCain and Bill Bradley before ordinary people have even started paying attention.

Another highlight is British journalist Greg Palast’s rant about the US media’s failure to follow up on his well-documented reports of widespread African-American disenfranchisement in Florida (see “Don’t Quote Me,” News and Features, December 21, 2000). “You’ve watched Murphy Brown so you think reporters hanker every day to uncover the big scandal,” Palast writes. “Bullshit. Remember, All the President’s Men was so unusual they had to make a movie out of it.”