THE MEDIA COVER-UP OF THE GORE VICTORY
PART THREE:  HITTING THE JACKPOT

By Carolyn Kay and David Podvin

You are the CEO of a multi-billion dollar corporation.  All of your training and your experience climbing the ladder of success has taught you that the only measure of that success is net worth—your company’s, and your own.  Your compensation package is structured so that significant increases in your company’s net worth result in significant increases in your personal net worth.

Your career is dependent on constantly improving the bottom line. Your personal net worth is a measure of your power and your importance.

It is early in the year 2000, and it is becoming apparent that the two major candidates for president will be Al Gore, currently Vice President of the United States, and George W. Bush, currently the governor of Texas.  The multi-billion dollar corporation you head owns a significant media subsidiary…

You have every reason to believe that George W. Bush, if elected president, will implement policies that will greatly enhance the value of the corporation you run…

As a corporate executive for a huge media conglomerate, you are confronted with a stark choice: Huge profits under a Bush Administration, or lesser revenues under Gore…

Without issuing a memo or giving verbal commands, you have insured that your journalist employees have gotten the message about how they should cover the campaign…

You, the CEO of a huge diversified conglomerate that owns a media conglomerate, had a tremendous financial interest in seeing that George Bush was elected president.  You had every reason to believe that his administration would provide great benefits to you and to your company.  Bush has begun to follow through. The decision by the FCC to eliminate the rule that limited concentrated corporate ownership of the media will, by itself, make your commitment to the Bush campaign one of the great investments in American corporate history.

You have already hit the jackpot, and there’s more to come. If FCC Chairman Michael Powell follows through on his promise to deregulate your industry “as much as possible”, then extraordinary wealth awaits the media giants who supported George W. Bush in 2000…

You have done everything in your power to put George W. Bush in the White House.  He has given your company huge monetary benefits in return…

If your company is a member of the Consortium of newspapers that commissioned the National Opinion Research Center of the University of Chicago to perform the definitive study of all uncounted ballots in the Florida 2000 presidential election, then your reporters in Florida have witnessed the decisive pro-Gore trend of that study. Your corporation has a tremendous financial incentive to keep the accurate results of that study from becoming public, given that the results will delegitimize the politician who is promoting your business interests…

Journalistic integrity dictates that they release the accurate results of that study to the public.

Financial self-interest dictates that they do not.

Unless public pressure causes the media elite to decide that failing to release the accurate results of the ballot study would do them more harm than good, it is likely that financial self interest will trump journalistic integrity.

As usual.  Read on...