THE MEDIA COVER-UP OF THE GORE VICTORY
PART FOUR: DEMOCRACY, GENERAL ELECTRIC STYLE

By David Podvin and Carolyn Kay

Shortly after George W. Bush declared his candidacy for president in June of 1999, General Electric Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Jack Welch was contacted by Bush political advisor Karl Rove. Welch later informed associates that Rove told him a Bush administration would initiate comprehensive deregulation of the broadcast industry. Rove guaranteed that deregulation would be implemented in a way that would create phenomenal profits for conglomerates with significant media holdings, like GE. Rove forcefully argued that General Electric and the other media giants had a compelling financial interest to see Bush become president.

Welch told several people at GE that the conversation with Rove convinced him that a Bush presidency would ultimately result in billions of dollars of additional profits for General Electric. Welch believed that it was his responsibility to operate in the best interest of GE shareholders, and that now meant using the full power of the world’s biggest corporation to get Bush into the White House.

Toward that end, Welch said that he would finally deal with a longstanding grievance of his: the ludicrous idea that news organizations should be allowed to operate in conflict with the best interests of the corporations that own them…

Specifically, NBC News was an asset owned by the shareholders of General Electric. It existed to make profits and to serve the interests of those who owned GE stock. Period.

Anything else, Welch told associates, was “liberal bullshit”…

He began to aggressively, but very discreetly, evangelize the gospel of corporate media as corporate lobbying tool. It was not a new concept; in the opinion of many, it was already the status quo. But from Welch’s point of view, the corporate news organizations were not living up to their potential.

The mainstream media could make George W. Bush president…

To Welch, although George W. Bush might not be a genius, his policies would encourage those who were geniuses to be even more innovative and productive. Fewer government regulations and lower corporate taxes would create technological advancement, thereby benefiting society more than all of the do-gooder social programs combined ever could…

By contrast, Welch viewed Al Gore as the candidate of the parasites. Gore voters were not the generators of wealth; they were the consumers of taxes. Welch privately described the typical Gore voter as “someone who needs all these goddamned social programs because she’s too goddamned dumb to keep her legs crossed and too goddamned lazy to get an abortion.”

This view of the world led Welch to implore associates at GE that doing whatever it took to get George W. Bush into the presidency was not only good for General Electric, it was good for America.

Having satisfied himself that his cause was just, Welch focused on putting his candidate in the White House with the tireless determination of a man whom Business Week described as having “an unbridled passion for winning”…

Welch was proud to have personally cultivated Tim Russert from a “lefty” to a responsible representative of GE interests. Welch sincerely believed that all liberals were phonies. He took great pleasure in “buying their leftist souls”, watching in satisfaction as former Democrats like Russert and MSNBC’s Chris Matthews eagerly discarded the baggage of their former progressive beliefs in exchange for cold hard GE cash. Russert was now an especially obedient and model employee in whom the company could take pride.

''It's a double-edged sword to be under Jack's detailed look,'' one GE executive told Fortune Magazine. ''If you do well, it's great. If you don't, it's bad news.”

It was bad news for NBC correspondent Claire Shipman, who made the mistake of offering a positive opinion of Al Gore on the air. Jack Welch, chairman and chief executive officer of a $350 billion conglomerate, responsible for overseeing the highly diversified activities of hundreds of thousands of employees working in over one hundred countries, was so incensed by her disobedience that he took time out of his busy schedule to personally confront her about it.

She no longer works for NBC…

Welch told associates that he enlisted two members of the GE board to assist him in shaping the coverage of the election by other news organizations…

There were never any explicit threats, but the implication was unavoidable: Bush is going to win, so you can join the team now or you can be on the outside looking in later. The only thing that will be affected is your livelihood…

A study by the Pew Research Center examined 2,400 newspaper, TV, and Internet stories. Researchers reported that three quarters of the coverage emphasized allegations that Gore was dishonest and corrupt. The study found that a majority of the stories about Bush emphasized that he was a "different kind of Republican," which was the Bush campaign’s chosen theme.

This was not a conspiracy, nor was it an accident. It was self-interest…

The deregulation of the American media, quietly promised by Bush and currently being implemented by [FCC Chairman Michael] Powell, will create countless billions of dollars of profits for the broadcasting industry. Al Gore opposed deregulation on the basis that a greater concentration of media power would damage the ability of the American people to get a diversity of information.

More than any other position he took, it cost him the presidency…

There were two men who had stood in the way of a George W. Bush presidency. Prior to facing Bush, John McCain and Al Gore both had reputations for being decent men who had honorably served their country in Vietnam and Washington. Based on their résumés, each of them was much more qualified to be president than Bush.

After the mainstream media got through with them, the two men were hardly recognizable. In the Republican primaries, McCain was recast from an ethical war hero to a mentally unbalanced flake who was in favor of breast cancer and whose wife was a junkie. In the general election, Gore was transformed from a bright and decent public servant into a congenital liar, a delusional criminal, and a traitor.

At the same time, George W. Bush somehow managed to fecklessly stumble through the entire campaign obstacle course without being harmed by his almost total lack of leadership experience, his highly suspicious military record, his two decades of alcohol and drug abuse, his alleged involvement in an illegal abortion, his shady business dealings, his record of corruption while governor of Texas, his losing battle with the English language, his unfortunate habit of repeatedly being caught telling blatant lies, and his positions on the major issues that consistently conflicted with the majority of voters. It helped that his opponent was unwilling to go for the jugular; it helped even more that the mainstream media considered any and all Bush vulnerabilities to be “charming”…

Once again, it is wrong to confuse self-interest with conspiracy. This is the Welch paradigm in action: It is the job of corporate reporters to help advance the corporate cause. There was no conspiracy on the part of the mainstream media organizations to usher Bush into the presidency. There was also no conspiracy on the part of the mainstream media organizations to lie, en masse, about Clinton aides vandalizing the White House and burglarizing Air Force One.

But the mainstream media organizations did lie…

The process of natural selection is the answer to the skeptics who question why no mainstream journalist has reported on this matter. The mainstream reporters who had the integrity to tell the truth, even if doing so would get them fired, have already been fired. The reporters who currently work for corporate news outlets keep their jobs by obeying the implicit corporate rules that have been put in place by executives like Jack Welch.

If not for the successful effort by Welch to manipulate media coverage of the election and the Florida recount, George W. Bush would not be president today. The Consortium ballot study was started by the same forces that had carried Bush across the finish line. The study was their attempt to universally legitimize the Bush presidency at a time when it looked as though there would otherwise be congressional gridlock that would limit how much Bush could accomplish for his campaign contributors.

Welch and the others who have been involved in covertly promoting Bush interests did not expect that the ballot study would reveal a decisive Gore victory. Although Consortium members disingenuously claim that the outcome of the study is unknown, they are aware that the observers in the coding rooms who were familiar with Florida voting patterns were able to perceive a dominant Gore trend.

The members of the Consortium are now stuck with a result that they view as being counterproductive to attaining their financial objectives. There is increasing recognition on the part of the public that something about the current delay in publishing the ballot study is not kosher…

Patriots who believe that democracy must be more than an empty cliché, and who want the unvarnished truth about the real winner of the 2000 presidential election, are severely limited in what they can do. We live in a pseudo democracy that has neither a free mainstream press nor a functioning opposition party. The current occupant of the White House is illegitimate by any standard other than “the ends justify the means”. The Supreme Court is corrupt. Most Americans have “moved on” and “gotten over it”.

For the minority in this country, those who are emotionally capable of confronting unpleasant facts, the truth is as clear as it is unpopular: America is now a place in which the son of a former leader who used to control the secret police was appointed to run the country by his daddy’s judges after his brother pulled an electoral fast one for him in the southern part of the country. The military contributed to the outcome by accusing the opposition leader of being “unpatriotic”, and by demanding that illegally cast military votes for Bush be counted as valid. The mainstream media protects its financial interests by smearing any dissidents as “fringe people”.

Many Americans prefer to dismiss these contentions as a “conspiracy theory”. Doing so is far less painful than coming to terms with the fact that this type of election result happens routinely around the world, but only in countries where self-government is rhetoric instead of reality. We are programmed from early childhood to recite that America is a democracy, yet even the most powerful programming is vulnerable to being overwhelmed by the truth. The unresolved question is how much truth will be required before it registers with the general public that they really have lost, in the words of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the right to have their votes counted…

In a democracy, it would matter. In a democracy, the identity of the person who was given the right to govern by the voters would be of paramount importance. In a democracy, the will of the people would be the single most important story possible, even more important than salacious stories about Democratic officials cavorting with Washington interns.

Who won the election does not matter when there is General Electric style democracy. GE has a long history of participating in governance around the world. The company has protected its financial interests by involving itself through active intervention and bribes in Indonesia, Mexico, Lesotho, Egypt, Israel, and Japan, among other countries.

For many years, human rights activists have cautioned that allowing multinational corporations to impose their will on people in foreign countries is a dangerous policy. There have been warnings that one day, corporations like General Electric might not feel constrained to limit their interference in the leadership selection process to places like Indonesia…

The corporate elite and their media Consortium have literally hundreds of billions of reasons to do what it takes to keep Bush in power. Whether they ever publicly report the inconvenient truth of the decisive Gore victory is problematic. It ultimately depends on whether the American people are so insistent in their demand to see the accurate outcome, that continuing to conceal the truth will cause more trouble for the media conglomerates than it is worth to them… Read on...