BY ROBERT PARRY
Al Gore was the choice of Florida's voters — whether one counts hanging chads or dimpled chads. That was the core finding of the eight news organisations that conducted a review of disputed Florida ballots.
Gore won even if one doesn't count the 15,000-25,000 votes that USA Today estimated he lost because of illegally designed "butterfly ballots", or the hundreds of predominantly African-American voters who were falsely identified by the state as felons and turned away from the polls.
Gore won even if there's no adjustment for George Bush's windfall of about 290 votes from improperly counted military absentee ballots where lax standards were applied to Republican counties and strict standards to Democratic ones, a violation of fairness reported earlier by the Washington Post and the New York Times.
Put differently, George Bush was not the choice of Florida's voters anymore than he was the choice of the American people who cast a half million more ballots for Gore than Bush nation-wide.
The spin
Yet, possibly for reasons of "patriotism" in this time of crisis, the news organisations that financed the Florida ballot study structured their stories on the ballot review to indicate that Bush was the legitimate winner, with headlines such as "Florida Recounts Would Have Favored Bush" (Washington Post, November 12, 2001).
Post media critic Howard Kurtz took the spin one cycle further with a story headlined, "George W. Bush, Now More Than Ever", in which Kurtz ridiculed as "conspiracy theorists" those who thought Gore had won.
"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, with the finding by eight news organizations that Bush would have beaten Gore under both of the recount plans being considered at the time."
Kurtz also mocked those who believed that winning an election fairly, based on the will of the voters, was important in a democracy. "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.
In other words, the elite media's judgment is in: "Bush won, get over it." Only "Gore partisans" — as both the Washington Post and the New York Times called critics of the official Florida election tallies — would insist on looking at the fine print.
While that was the tone of coverage in these leading news outlets, it's still a bit jarring to go outside the articles and read the actual results of the state-wide review of 175,010 disputed ballots.
"Full Review Favors Gore", the Washington Post said in a box on page 10, showing that under all standards applied to the ballots, Gore came out on top. The New York Times' graphic revealed the same outcome.
This core finding of Gore's Florida victory in the unofficial ballot recount might surprise many readers who skimmed only the headlines and the top paragraphs of the articles. The headlines and leads highlighted hypothetical, partial recounts that supposedly favoured Bush.
Buried deeper in the stories or referenced in subheads was the fact that the new recount determined that Gore was the winner state-wide, even ignoring the "butterfly ballot" and other irregularities that cost him thousands of ballots.
The news organisations opted for the pro-Bush leads by focusing on two partial recounts that were proposed — but not completed — in the chaotic, often ugly environment of last November and December.
If the news organisations had simply given the American people the unvarnished facts, the reality that the voters of Florida favoured Al Gore might have bolstered the belief that Bush indeed did steal the White House. That, in turn, could have undermined his legitimacy during the current crisis over terrorism.
[Abridged from <http://www.consortiumnews.com>.]
From Green Left Weekly, November 21, 2001.
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