Last night journalist Amy Goodman and Stanford scholars Larry Diamond, David Dill and John McManus stressed the importance of grassroots activism in “Onward! A Post-Election Town Hall Meeting.” Diamond, Dill and McManus addressed the need for accountability in Iraq, electronic voting and the effects of market-driven media, respectively.

The dialogue focused more on active involvement than on the election itself.

“Things don’t look great right now,” said Mark Gonnerman, one of the event’s organizers. “But hope means active participation in improving the political and social world.”

An attentive audience gave Goodman, the host of the daily radio newsmagazine “Democracy Now!”, a standing ovation as she was introduced by the moderator of the discussion. Goodman congratulated the audience for attending instead of “sitting home alone, giving up.”

The event consisted of a 45-minute discussion between the three scholars and a 45-minute question and answer period.

Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, was a senior advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad from January to April of this year. He said that most people do not understand how imminent and dangerous the choices the government faces are.

The author of the article “What Went Wrong in Iraq,” published this fall in Foreign Affairs, Diamond said that the lack of foresight of senior Pentagon leaders was a “moral outrage,” and he stressed the need for a more thorough investigation of senior officials’ involvement in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. “There needs to be accountability,” he said.

Dill, a computer science professor, talked about the lack of reliability and accountability in electronic voting systems, which were used at Stanford polling places on Tuesday.

“Electronic voting technology is inherently not transparent,” he said.

Dill said that an ideal voting system would be precinct-based optical scanning systems, which would not only have fewer errors but would generate a paper trail.

Although the electronic voting systems used in several areas this year probably made some mistakes, he believes that these errors likely were not important enough to change the outcome of the election.

McManus, director of Grade the News, a media research group that rates the quality of the news media in the Bay Area, said that he thinks the the American media exploit the public’s susceptibility to images, especially through political advertising. Grade the News is affiliated with and based at Stanford’s Graduate Program in Journalism.

According to McManus, many corporate television stations using public airwaves are willing to do whatever it takes to improve ratings, rather than act in the best interests of public education.

“We can’t afford this kind of air pollution that’s suffocating our democracy,” he said, and suggested that a solution would be giving candidates publicly funded airtime.

McManus also said he feels that citizen activism creates pressure on the market-driven media.

“It’s sad when we have to rely on activists to do things that federal agencies are supposed to do,” he said.

During the question-and-answer period, many of the audience members asked questions ranging in topics from human rights issues to local election results, rather than directly addressing the topics presented in the forum.

Freshman Kellen Schefter said that he didn’t feel that the forum covered what he thought would be a discussion of the election results.

“I expected, actually, a somber tone of how bad the next four years would be,” he said. “But I left reassured that the overall election was only a small part of the global issues. I do feel inspired.”

Goodman emphasized what she believes to be the promise of the next four years and said that a mass gathering such as “Onward!” is critical for promoting change.

“You’re the leader, and you have proven what mass movements can do,” she said. “Change takes time, but also absolute persistence and determination.”

The event was sponsored by the Aurora Forum, a group that promotes citizen participation in the political process.