Stolen election... No, it won't go away...

robert parry of consortium news analyzes how we got to this point...

Under traditional news judgment, the lead paragraph in American newspapers on the morning of Nov. 12, 2001, should have read something like: “If all legally cast votes in Florida were counted in Election 2000, Democrat Al Gore would have carried the state and thus won the White House, according to an unofficial tally of disputed ballots.”

Indeed, the tally found that Gore would have carried Florida’s key electoral votes regardless of the standard used for judging so-called “undervotes,” ballots kicked out by vote-counting machines which could detect no presidential choice. Gore won even ignoring Florida’s other irregularities – such as the badly designed “butterfly ballots” and the improper “felon purges” – that cost him thousands of additional votes.

To put it more starkly, a recount conducted by a consortium of major media organizations had determined that George W. Bush, the guy in the White House, not only lost the national popular vote but should have lost the Electoral College, too. To be even blunter, a pivotal U.S. presidential election had been stolen.

But that wasn’t how the major newspapers and TV networks presented their findings. Instead, they bent over backwards to concoct hypothetical situations in which George W. Bush might still have won the presidency – if the recount had been limited to only a few counties or if legal “overvotes,” where a voter both checks and writes in the name of the candidate, were cast aside.

Though the news media’s recount had started with the goal of assessing whether Florida voters favored Gore or Bush, that purpose was lost in a rush to shore up Bush’s fragile legitimacy in the weeks after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

The key discovery of Gore’s victory was buried deep in the stories or relegated to charts that accompanied the articles.

i guess i can stretch my understanding to encompass why the media might want to shore up bush's fragile legitimacy following 9/11... i guess... how convenient for george that it worked out that way...

Submit To Propeller
Tweet