HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK ---------------------------
mart wrote:
HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK ---------------------------"Hail to the Thief!"mart.Well, personally, I don't know what the difference would have been if Gore had been elected President anyway. For one thing, I'm sure he would have responded just as militaristically to the September 11th tragedy. I remember in the debates how he seemed proud of the fact that he agreed with Bush on almost all of the foreign policy issues, eg. bombing Iraq, sanctions, etc.
Peacefully yours,
Nancy Hey
----- Original Message -----From: John Roberts <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>Sent: Wednesday, December 05, 2001 9:09 PMSubject: Fw: [Democrat-Forum] Gore Wins
----- Original Message -----
From: Dump Dubya <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Wednesday, December 05, 2001 2:17 PM
Subject: [Democrat-Forum] Gore Wins
consortiumnews.com
Dissing Democracy
By Robert Parry
December 5, 2001Major national news outlets have gone silent in the
face of evidence that they published misleading
stories about the Florida presidential recount.The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, the
Washington Post and other leading news organizations
relied on a dubious hypothesis to craft stories last
month portraying George W. Bush as the recount winner,
when the recount actually showed that Al Gore won if
all legally cast votes were counted.The news outlets assumed, incorrectly as it turned
out, that so-called "overvotes," which heavily favored
Gore, would have been ignored if the Florida
court-ordered recount had been allowed to proceed and
that therefore Bush would have won even without the
intervention of five conservative allies on the U.S.
Supreme Court."Study of Disputed Florida Ballots Finds Justices Did
Not Cast the Deciding Vote," the New York Times
front-page headline read. "Florida Recounts Would Have
Favored Bush," declared the Washington Post.After those stories were published on Nov. 12,
however, new evidence emerged showing that this
pro-Bush hypothesis was wrong. It turned out that the
judge in charge of the recount was moving to include
the "overvotes" when Bush got the U.S. Supreme Court
to intervene.But rather than run corrections, the major news
organizations chose to duck the fact that they had
messed up one of the biggest political stories in U.S.
history.After learning of this foul-up via the Internet, some
citizens complained in letters and e-mails, but the
news outlets have responded by turning their backs on
the complaints. There has been virtually no debate or
commentary in the major news media about the mistaken
assumption at the heart of those front-page stories.The silence has sent another message: that the news
media believes that something as fundamental to
democracy as making sure the person with the most
votes wins is a kind of trivial pursuit interesting
only to Gore "partisans." In this time of crisis, the
news media seems to be saying, it isn't important that
the occupant of the White House got there in an
anti-democratic fashion -- and if that happens to be
the case, it's best not to talk about it.'Gore Wins'
In their Nov. 12 recount articles, all the leading
news organizations downplayed the key fact of the
unofficial recount: that a full counting of all
legally cast ballots in Florida showed that Al Gore
won the state, regardless of what standards were used
n judging the chads, whether dimpled, hanging or
fully punched through. Gore also won the national
popular vote by about 537,000 votes, a number that
exceeded the victory margins of John Kennedy in 1960
and Richard Nixon in 1968.Still, the major news outlets that paid for the
recount led their articles with the claim that Bush
would have won the election even if five conservatives
on the U.S. Supreme Court had not intervened on Dec.
9, 2000, to stop the statewide hand recount ordered by
the Florida Supreme Court.To construct that lead, the newspapers deleted legally
cast votes for Gore and instead used a hypothesis that
presumed that the statewide recount would not have
counted so-called "overvotes" that broke heavily for
Gore. By subtracting the "overvotes" from the total
and including only "undervotes," the big media got a
number that showed Bush still clinging to a tiny lead."Undervotes" were ballots kicked out of voting
machines that recognized no vote for president.
"Overvotes" were ballots that the machines rejected as
having more than one vote for president. However,
under Florida law, hand recounts must include those
ballots if the intent of the voter is clear.For instance, if a voter marked a ballot for Gore and
then wrote in Gore's name, that should count as a
legal vote in Florida, as well as many other states.
If an "undervote" revealed a partially pushed through
chad, that too could be counted as a legal vote. By
counting all the ballots where the intent of the voter
was clear, Gore pushed ahead of Bush by margins
ranging from 60 to 171 votes depending on the
standards used to judge the "undervotes," according to
the media recounts.Besides those legal votes that should have been
counted under Florida law, the media recounts
estimated that Gore lost tens of thousands of other
unrecoverable ballots. Those were lost because of
confusing ballot designs, actions by Gov. Jeb Bush's
administration purging hundreds of predominantly
African-American voters by falsely labeling them
felons, and the Bush campaign's success in counting
illegally cast absentee ballots in Republican counties
while excluding them in Democratic counties.No adjustments were made for those lost votes in the
media recounts, though they help explain why Election
Day exit polls showed Gore winning Florida, since he
was the choice of a clear plurality of Florida voters.A Media Miscalculation
But what made the journalistic slant of last month's
"Bush Wins Recount" stories indefensible was the
erroneous assumption that the recount ordered by the
Florida Supreme Court would have excluded "overvotes."Unlike the major national newspapers, however, the
Orlando Sentinel of Florida checked with the judge who
was in charge of the recount to see what he might have
done with the "overvotes." Leon County Circuit Judge
Terry Lewis said he had not fully made up his mind
about counting the "overvotes," but he added: "I'd be
open to that."The Sentinel stated, "If that had happened, it would
have amounted to a statewide hand recount. And it
could have given the election to Gore." [Orlando
Sentinel, Nov. 12, 2001]
> Then, Newsweek uncovered a contemporaneous document
demonstrating that Lewis was moving toward counting
the "overvotes" on Dec. 9, just hours before Bush got
five Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the
Florida recount. In a memo, Lewis said he was
instructing canvassing boards to isolate "overvotes"
that showed a clear intent of the voters."If you would segregate 'overvotes' as you describe
and indicate in your final report how many where you
determined the clear intent of the voter," wrote
Lewis, "I will rule on the issue for all counties."In effect, Lewis's instructions foreshadowed a
decision to count the "overvotes" because once the
votes - that were legal under Florida law - had been
identified there would be no legal or logical reason
to throw them out, especially since some counties had
already included "overvotes" in their counts.By assuming that the "overvotes" would be cast aside,
the major news outlets had failed to take into account
the judge in charge of the recount.Punishing Journalists
Normally when serious journalistic errors are made on
high-profile stories, a media firestorm ensues. Even
when stories are just hyped - not dead wrong -
editorialists and media critics rush to rap the
knuckles of the offending reporters.Remember, the furor over a CNN report quoting former
U.S. military officials seeming to confirm that poison
gas was used on defectors and other sensitive targets
during the Vietnam War. Press critics demanded a
retraction, CNN admitted flaws in the reporting, and
two producers lost their jobs amid public humiliation.Remember, too, Gary Webb's stories about the CIA
tolerating cocaine trafficking by Nicaraguan contra
forces, leading to the introduction of crack cocaine
in Los Angeles and other U.S. cities. Though the CIA
inspector general eventually confirmed that the CIA
and the Reagan-Bush administration had protected
contra-cocaine trafficking, major newspapers
concentrated their wrath on Webb for supposedly
exaggerating CIA malfeasance. He, too, lost his job,
at the San Jose Mercury News. [For details, see Robert
Parry's Lost History.]In the Florida recount screw-up, however, the major
news organizations simply turned a deaf ear to the
fact that their core assumption was wrong. No one
apparently will pay any price.More significantly, the vast majority of Americans
probably have no idea that they were misled by those
stories. Millions of Internet readers may know the
truth and some Americans may have heard the news by
word of mouth, but the big media's refusal to revisit
an embarrassing mistake has guaranteed that most
voters will remain uninformed.Part of the reason for this self-protective behavior
is that prominent media critics, such as Howard Kurtz
of the Washington Post, embraced the inaccurate
reporting."The conspiracy theorists have been out in force,
convinced that the media were covering up the Florida
election results to protect President Bush," Kurtz
wrote. "That gets put to rest today."
> Kurtz scoffed, too, at the notion that anyone still
cared about whether Bush had stolen the presidential
election. "Now the question is: How many people still
care about the election deadlock that last fall felt
like the story of the century - and now faintly echoes
like some distant Civil War battle?" he wrote.
[Washington Post, Nov. 12, 2001]Fearing the 'Liberal' Label
Why, many Americans wonder, is the national press
corps acting in a way that seems so disrespectful of
the democratic process? The answer is, partly at
least, fear and self-interest.While conservatives continue to charge that the
national news media has a "liberal" bias, the reality
for at least the past two decades has been that
working journalists who got labeled "liberal" or who
offended the powerful conservative establishment in
Washington could expect their careers to be damaged,
if not terminated, as occurred in the CNN and Webb
cases.As self-protection, journalists therefore have learned
to bend over backwards to avoid offending
conservatives. Journalists have no similar fear of
liberal press critics.This reality was on display throughout the 1990s as
the Washington press corps sought to prove it wasn't
liberal by playing up petty scandals that kept the
Clinton administration on the defensive. Starting with
overwrought coverage of Bill and Hillary Clinton's
Whitewater real estate deal and the furor over the
firings at the White House Travel Office, mainstream
and conservative news outlets alike kept up the
barrage right through Clinton's impeachment over
fibbing about having sex with Monica Lewinsky.This phenomenon of national reporters proving they
aren't liberals spilled over to the coverage of
Campaign 2000, where Vice President Gore was hectored
for minor or imaginary examples of supposed
exaggerations. The news media - from the establishment
New York Times and Washington Post to the conservative
New York Post and Washington Times - joined in
portraying Gore as a serial exaggerator whose behavior
bordered on the delusional.To create this caricature of Gore - who is, by any
reasonable measure, a hard-working and
well-intentioned public servant - the news media
literally made up quotes for Gore and misrepresented a
variety of other statements.Some of the misrepresented statements became political
urban legends, such as Gore's never-spoken claim that
he "invented" the Internet and his supposedly false
claim that author Eric Segal had used him as a model
for a character in the novel, Love Story. Though Segal
later confirmed this fact, the media continued to
insist that Gore had made it up.In another case, the media accused Gore of suffering
from delusional tendencies for allegedly commenting
about the Love Canal toxic-waste investigation that "I
was the one that started it all," a quote used in
critical stories in both the New York Times and the
Washington Post.In reality, Gore had been referring to another
toxic-waste case in Toone, Tennessee, and had said
"that was the one that started it all." The major
newspapers had simply gotten the quote wrong and then
dragged their heels on issuing a correction, while the
mistake spread to dozens of other news organizations
around the country. [For a fuller account of this
case, see Consortiumnews.com's "Al Gore v. the
Media."]A Bush-Cheney Tilt
Rolling Stone magazine has published a new study of
this anti-Gore media bias and quotes reporters on the
campaign trail acknowledging the press hostility
toward the then-vice president."The coverage seemed to be much more aggressive and
adversarial than I'd ever seen before," said Scott
Shepard, a veteran newsman who covered the campaign
for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
> A network television correspondent was quoted as
saying, "There just developed among a certain group of
people covering Gore, particularly the print people, a
real disdain for him. Everything was negative. They
had a grudge against [Gore]. I don't know how else to
put it."The Rolling Stone article by Eric Boehlert quoted Ceci
Connolly, the Washington Post reporter who misquoted
Gore about Love Canal. She continued to insist that
her misquote "did not change the context" of Gore's
original comment, though any fair reading of Gore's
remarks would indicate that he was not claiming to
have been the first one to discover the toxic-waste
problem at Love Canal. [Rolling Stone, Dec. 6-13,
2001.]Katharine Seeyle, the New York Times reporter who
joined Connolly in making the Love Canal misquote,
also has stood by the general accuracy of her account.
Both reporters continue to hold down high-profile jobs
as correspondents at these two leading newspapers.Neither they nor any of the other reporters who
demonstrated unprofessional hostility toward Gore have
suffered the fates of the CNN producers on the
poison-gas story or Gary Webb on the contra-crack
stories. [For the most detailed coverage of the Gore
exaggeration topic, see the archives at Bob Somerby's
Daily Howler Web site.]To make this caricature of Gore as a pathological liar
stand out in even starker contrast, the campaign press
corps chose to ignore or play down exaggerations and
even outright lies told by Bush and his running mate,
Dick Cheney.For instance, during the vice presidential debate,
Cheney depicted himself as a self-made
multi-millionaire from his years as chairman of
Halliburton Co. As for his success in the private
sector, Cheney declared that "the government had
absolutely nothing to do with it."The reality was quite different, however, since Cheney
had personally lobbied for government subsidies that
benefited Halliburton, including federal loan
guarantees from the U.S.-funded Export-Import Bank.
During Cheney's tenure, Halliburton also emerged as a
leading defense contractor with $1.8 billion in
contracts from 1996-99.Immediately after the debate, Cheney went on the road
and denounced Gore for having an apparent "compulsion
to embellish his arguments or ... his resumé." Yet,
the major news media made no note of Cheney's own
resumé polishing, though that information was all on
the public record. [For details, Consortiumnews.com's
"Protecting Bush-Cheney."]The Recount Battle
The anti-Gore bias carried into the post-election
battle for a full-and-fair count of the Florida votes.
From the start, commentators leaned heavily on Gore to
concede, though his lead in the popular vote was
swelling to over a half million votes and he was only
a few votes shy of a majority in the Electoral College
even without Florida.Mike Barnicle of the New York Daily News argued that
Gore should do the right thing and give up. "This
could be Al Gore's moment," Barnicle said on MSNBC on
Nov. 8, 2000. "It could be the moment where he finally
gets the chance to live up to his great father's
ideals and have the courage to step aside."NBC's Tim Russert declared that Gore "can't extend it
to too long, nor can he become a whiner about
Florida." As for Gore's advisers, Russert said, "If
they continue then to file lawsuits and begin to
contest various areas of the state, then people will
begin to suggest, 'uh-oh, this is not magnanimous.
This is being a sore loser.'"Conservative commentators made similar arguments with
a nastier tone.On Nov. 12, columnist George Will wrote that "all that
remains to complete the squalor of Gore's attempted
coup d'etat is some improvisation by Janet Reno, whose
last Florida intervention involved a lawless SWAT team
seizing a 6-year-old. She says there is no federal
role, but watch for a 'civil rights' claim on behalf
of some protected minority or some other conjured
pretext."Gore's decision to fight for Florida "made the
poisonous political atmosphere in Washington even more
toxic," said Fox News' Tony Snow on Nov. 12, 2000.
"Gore has established a precedent for turning
elections into legal circuses and giving the final
word not to voters but to squadrons of lawyers." [For
a fuller compilation of post-election comments, see
FAIR's "Media Vs. Democracy"
http://www.fair.org/articles/media-vs-democracy.html]The irony of Snow's words would become apparent only a
month later when Bush sent a squadron of lawyers to
convince five Republican justices on the U.S. Supreme
Court to prevent any more counting of votes and to
deny the voters of Florida the final word.No Change
In the year that has followed, the media trends have
continued down the same course, with Bush still
getting the kid-glove treatment and Gore still coping
with press misquotes.In late November, Gore came in for a new round of
ridicule for a supposed claim that he had opened a
family restaurant in Tennessee. Quoting a Gore speech
in Lagos, Nigeria, Reuters reported that Gore had
said, "We have started a family restaurant in
Tennessee and we are running it ourselves."To some journalists, this sounded like another case of
Lyin' Al claiming some accomplishment that didn't
really exist. Comedian Jay Leno included a joke about
Gore's restaurant in his monologue on NBC's "Tonight"
show.When Gore returned to the United States, however, a
transcript was made from a tape of his speech.
According to the tape transcript, Gore had actually
said, "We stopped at a little family restaurant in
Tennessee. We were eating there by ourselves." Reuters
then retracted the story. [Washington Post, Dec. 1,
2001]But the most fitting final comment on Election 2000
may be the silence of major news outlets in the face
of evidence that they misreported the results of their
own recount - and in doing so, awarded legitimacy to
George W. Bush, the man who lost the election but won
the White House.
> [For more on studies about the election results, see
Consortiumnews.com stories of May 12, June 2, July 16,
Nov. 12, and Nov. 22.]In the 1980s, writing for the Associated Press and
Newsweek, Robert Parry broke many of the stories now
known as the Iran-Contra Affair. His latest book is
Lost History, a study of how propaganda has altered
Americans' understanding of their recent history.http://www.consortiumnews.com/Print/120601a.html
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