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 media’s pattern of lying that
recurred throughout the presidential campaign.
Part two in this series deals with the Consortium’s lack of candor as it has
sought to advance its own financial interests by concealing Al Gore’s clear
victory in Florida and refusing to acknowledge that he was the rightful winner
in the 2000 presidential election…
To those who were carefully observing the coding, and who had enough
knowledge of Florida county ballot configurations and precinct voting patterns
to figure out which number represented Bush and which represented Gore, it was
clear exactly how the vote categorization was going. Specifically, they saw the
inclusion of many disputed ballots that had been successfully excluded from
previous recounts because of pressure tactics by the Bush campaign. In the
objective, professional setting of the NORC coding process, the winner of the
overwhelming number of previously disputed ballots was Al Gore…
It is simply false for the Consortium to claim people were unaware that the
results were developing in a way that would be highly embarrassing, at best, for
George W. Bush. The Republican observers saw the strong pro-Gore trend and
responded with typical aplomb. A G.O.P. activist accused one NORC coder of being
drunk on the job, a lie that was later disproven. Even so, Republican operatives
reportedly pressured another coder to confirm the phony allegation. The
Republicans yelled about the quality of the coders, screamed about the treachery
of the process, and threw temper tantrums about the unfairness of it all. Of
course, they offered no proof of their slanderous charges. Though the G.O.P.
observers were publicly panicking as the trend continued strongly against them,
the Consortium observers in the very same rooms claim to be completely unaware
of who was winning…