THE MEDIA COVER-UP OF THE GORE VICTORY December 2003
http://makethemaccountable.com/coverup/index.htm By David Podvin According to a source whose previous information has proven to be accurate, the Consortium of news organizations that recounted the presidential votes in the 2000 Florida election was shocked to find that former Vice President Al Gore decisively won the state, and it is now concealing the news of Gores victory from the American people. The source is a former media executive who previously revealed information that the Bush administration was lying about Clinton staffers having vandalized the White House. That information led me to accuse Karl Rove of manufacturing the crime. My accusation appeared in an article that was posted by Buzzflash.com on January 28, 2001, and it was confirmed by a General Accounting Office investigative report several months later. Having previously established credibility as a well-informed and accurate conduit of information, the executive now claims the Consortium is deliberately hiding the results of its recount because Gore was the indisputable winner. Originally, the Consortium believed that there were three potential outcomes of the recount, any of which would have been acceptable to the participating news conglomerates. The first was a Bush win, which would have resolved the issue. The second was a dead heat/inconclusive result, which would have maintained the status quo. The third was a narrow Gore victory, which would have given die hard Democrats a debate point, but would have simply been another photo finish recount that most Americans would have disregarded as being currently irrelevant. The Consortium was stunned to discover that the recount revealed Gore won a clear victory. Even after casting aside the controversial butterfly ballots and discarding ballots that were iffy, Gore decisively won the recount. While the precise numbers are still unavailable, a New York Times journalist who was involved in the project told one of his former companions that Gore won by a sufficient margin to create major trouble for the Bush presidency if this ever gets out. Gores victory was large enough that it became apparent he would win prior to the Consortium recount being fully completed. And contrary to a recent claim by the New York Times, the terrorism of September 11 was not the crucial factor that determined whether to release the results to the American people. Prior to that time, the de facto majority shareholders in the publicly traded New York Times Company reportedly intervened on the side of quashing the recount results and convinced the other participants to shelve the story. The executive claims that the most important decisions at the Times are made by the influential money center banks that exercise actual voting control of a majority of stock. These banks are extremely pro-Bush. In addition to their control of the Times, they have substantial financial clout with the Washington Post Company, Dow Jones and Company, and the Tribune Company. As a result, the banks exert tremendous influence on a majority of the Consortium. The story of Gores victory has been spiked at the highest levels of the media conglomerates that are involved, rather than at the cosmetic steering committee level of the recount project. The Consortium reportedly has received intense pressure from members of the Bush inner circle both in and out of government, but has not been lobbied by representatives of Gore. The huge disparity between the original recount and the Consortium recount stems from the G.O.P. tactics in Florida. Their strategy was to aggressively contest every pro-Gore ballot, even the obviously valid ones. The Republicans then accused the vote counters of being biased because most of the challenges were resolved in favor of Gore. By using this approach, the Bush partisans successfully intimidated the counters into bending over backwards to show fairness, resulting in thousands of legitimate Gore votes being disqualified or relegated to a pile of disputed ballots. It was the old baseball managers trick of crying about every call in order to pressure the umpire to give you more than your fair share, said the executive. And it worked in Florida. However, in the relative calm of the Consortium recount - absent the pressure tactics - the Bush total remained basically consistent with the original count, while the Gore total shot way up. As for what will happen next, the executive said, Once the dominant pro-Gore trend became apparent, the Consortium was never going to release the results; the pressure from the big money boys was too great. Terrorism just provided a better excuse for withholding the information than the technical difficulties stalling tactic that was otherwise going to be used. The Consortium is determined to make sure that the original results of their recount will never see the light of day.
THE MEDIA COVER-UP OF THE GORE VICTORY PART TWO: THE DECEIT OF THE CONSORTIUM By David Podvin and Carolyn Kay The Consortium of media organizations that has delayed announcing the results of the Florida presidential election ballot study contends that it had absolutely no idea who was going to win that recount. The Consortium further contends that the ballots have not yet been tabulated, making it impossible for anyone to know the outcome. It also states that the results of the ballot study would have been released to the American people if not for the terrorist attack on September 11. The Consortium is engaging in sophistry. It is deliberately seeking to deceive the public with incomplete and misleading information. This dishonesty is entirely consistent with the mainstream medias pattern of lying that recurred throughout the presidential campaign. Part two in this series deals with the Consortiums lack of candor as it has sought to advance its own financial interests by concealing Al Gores clear victory in Florida and refusing to acknowledge that he was the rightful winner in the 2000 presidential election. It is important to emphasize that we do not allege the conglomerates that control the American mainstream media have engaged in a conspiracy, only that they have damaged American democracy by conducting themselves with unpatriotic self interest and all consuming greed. On January 9, 2001, eight media organizations announced their intention to form the Consortium that would examine and classify the votes in the Florida presidential election. The eight news organizations were The New York Times, The Washington Post, Dow Jones and Company (The Wall Street Journal), the Associated Press, The Tribune Company (The Los Angeles Times and The Chicago Tribune, among others), The Palm Beach Post, The St. Petersburg Times, and CNN (which later dropped out). The Consortium sought to gain credibility for the integrity of its recount by hiring the not-for-profit National Opinion Research Center to perform the actual ballot handling tasks and to compile the relevant information. NORC was assigned to provide the raw data to each of the members of the Consortium. It would then be up to the individual media outlets to decide how they would interpret and report the data to the American people. All of this was to be completed by April, 2001. At the time that the Consortium announced its plans to categorize the votes, some national public opinion polls showed that over a third of Americans considered George W. Bush to be an illegitimate president. Several prominent syndicated columnists had written that Gore was fortunate to lose, because the poisonous atmosphere in the aftermath of the controversial election guaranteed that the new president was destined to one term of bitterness and gridlock. The perception of the mainstream political and media analysts was that there were only three possible outcomes of the ballot study: Bush could win in a photo finish, as he had in each previous recount. It could turn out to be a dead heat. Gore could win in a photo finish. Two thirds of Americans surveyed said that they were ready to move on. They believed that it was basically an even election; they might never be completely sure who actually won, but someone had to be president, and Bush won the recounts and the Supreme Court verdict. For most Americans, regardless of who literally won an election that was too close to call, it was time to get on with life. Against this backdrop, any of the three results of the ballot study that were considered possible would not be harmful to Bush. If the ballot study showed he won, then that would confirm he was the legitimate president. If it were a tie, then he would be no worse off than before the study was released. If Gore won a squeaker, then the most diehard of the Democrats might challenge the legitimacy of a Bush administration, but the GOP had prepared for that possibility by assigning party activists to every Florida county for the specific purpose of screaming fraud. Another very close vote accompanied by frenzied controversy would make the Consortium ballot study just a tiresome repeat of the soap opera that most of election-weary America had already seen and turned off. If the establishment deep thinkers were right, then the only possible results from the Consortium study could help legitimize Bush, but could not harm his legitimacy among those Americans who had gotten over it. There was, however, a potential complication that had been discounted by the corporations that were financing
