In article <1072409899.59200@irys.nyx.net>, Name withheld by request says...
THE MEDIA COVER-UP OF THE GORE VICTORY
December 2003
http://makethemaccountable.com/coverup/index.htm
By David Podvin
According to a source whose previous information has proven to be
accurate, the Consortium of news organizations that recounted the
presidential votes in the 2000 Florida election was shocked to find
that former Vice President Al Gore decisively won the state, and it is
now concealing the news of Gores victory from the American people.
The source is a former media executive who previously revealed
information that the Bush administration was lying about Clinton
staffers having vandalized the White House. That information led me to
accuse Karl Rove of manufacturing the crime. My accusation appeared in
an article that was posted by Buzzflash.com on January 28, 2001, and
it was confirmed by a General Accounting Office investigative report
several months later.
Having previously established credibility as a well-informed and
accurate conduit of information, the executive now claims the
Consortium is deliberately hiding the results of its recount because
Gore was the indisputable winner.
Originally, the Consortium believed that there were three potential
outcomes of the recount, any of which would have been acceptable to
the participating news conglomerates. The first was a Bush win, which
would have resolved the issue. The second was a dead heat/inconclusive
result, which would have maintained the status quo. The third was a
narrow Gore victory, which would have given die hard Democrats a
debate point, but would have simply been another photo finish recount
that most Americans would have disregarded as being currently
irrelevant.
The Consortium was stunned to discover that the recount revealed Gore
won a clear victory. Even after casting aside the controversial
butterfly ballots and discarding ballots that were iffy, Gore
decisively won the recount. While the precise numbers are still
unavailable, a New York Times journalist who was involved in the
project told one of his former companions that Gore won by a
sufficient margin to create major trouble for the Bush presidency if
this ever gets out.
Gores victory was large enough that it became apparent he would win
prior to the Consortium recount being fully completed. And contrary to
a recent claim by the New York Times, the terrorism of September 11
was not the crucial factor that determined whether to release the
results to the American people. Prior to that time, the de facto
majority shareholders in the publicly traded New York Times Company
reportedly intervened on the side of quashing the recount results and
convinced the other participants to shelve the story. The executive
claims that the most important decisions at the Times are made by the
influential money center banks that exercise actual voting control of
a majority of stock. These banks are extremely pro-Bush. In addition
to their control of the Times, they have substantial financial clout
with the Washington Post Company, Dow Jones and Company, and the
Tribune Company. As a result, the banks exert tremendous influence on
a majority of the Consortium.
The story of Gores victory has been spiked at the highest levels of
the media conglomerates that are involved, rather than at the cosmetic
steering committee level of the recount project. The Consortium
reportedly has received intense pressure from members of the Bush
inner circle both in and out of government, but has not been lobbied
by representatives of Gore.
The huge disparity between the original recount and the Consortium
recount stems from the G.O.P. tactics in Florida. Their strategy was
to aggressively contest every pro-Gore ballot, even the obviously
valid ones. The Republicans then accused the vote counters of being
biased because most of the challenges were resolved in favor of Gore.
By using this approach, the Bush partisans successfully intimidated
the counters into bending over backwards to show fairness, resulting
in thousands of legitimate Gore votes being disqualified or relegated
to a pile of disputed ballots.
It was the old baseball managers trick of crying about every call in
order to pressure the umpire to give you more than your fair share,
said the executive. And it worked in Florida. However, in the relative
calm of the Consortium recount - absent the pressure tactics - the
Bush total remained basically consistent with the original count,
while the Gore total shot way up.
As for what will happen next, the executive said, Once the dominant
pro-Gore trend became apparent, the Consortium was never going to
release the results; the pressure from the big money boys was too
great. Terrorism just provided a better excuse for withholding the
information than the technical difficulties stalling tactic that was
otherwise going to be used. The Consortium is determined to make sure
that the original results of their recount will never see the light of
day.
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 medias pattern
of lying that recurred throughout the presidential campaign.
Part two in this series deals with the Consortiums lack of candor as
it has sought to advance its own financial interests by concealing Al
Gores clear victory in Florida and refusing to acknowledge that he was
the rightful winner in the 2000 presidential election.
It is important to emphasize that we do not allege the conglomerates
that control the American mainstream media have engaged in a
conspiracy, only that they have damaged American democracy by
conducting themselves with unpatriotic self interest and all consuming
greed.
On January 9, 2001, eight media organizations announced their
intention to form the Consortium that would examine and classify the
votes in the Florida presidential election. The eight news
organizations were The New York Times, The Washington Post, Dow Jones
and Company (The Wall Street Journal), the Associated Press, The
Tribune Company (The Los Angeles Times and The Chicago Tribune, among
others), The Palm Beach Post, The St. Petersburg Times, and CNN (which
later dropped out).
The Consortium sought to gain credibility for the integrity of its
recount by hiring the not-for-profit National Opinion Research Center
to perform the actual ballot handling tasks and to compile the
relevant information. NORC was assigned to provide the raw data to
each of the members of the Consortium. It would then be up to the
individual media outlets to decide how they would interpret and report
the data to the American people.
All of this was to be completed by April, 2001.
At the time that the Consortium announced its plans to categorize the
votes, some national public opinion polls showed that over a third of
Americans considered George W. Bush to be an illegitimate president.
Several prominent syndicated columnists had written that Gore was
fortunate to lose, because the poisonous atmosphere in the aftermath
of the controversial election guaranteed that the new president was
destined to one term of bitterness and gridlock.
The perception of the mainstream political and media analysts was that
there were only three possible outcomes of the ballot study:
Bush could win in a photo finish, as he had in each previous recount.
It could turn out to be a dead heat.
Gore could win in a photo finish.
Two thirds of Americans surveyed said that they were ready to move on.
They believed that it was basically an even election; they might never
be completely sure who actually won, but someone had to be president,
and Bush won the recounts and the Supreme Court verdict. For most
Americans, regardless of who literally won an election that was too
close to call, it was time to get on with life.
Against this backdrop, any of the three results of the ballot study
that were considered possible would not be harmful to Bush. If the
ballot study showed he won, then that would confirm he was the
legitimate president. If it were a tie, then he would be no worse off
than before the study was released. If Gore won a squeaker, then the
most diehard of the Democrats might challenge the legitimacy of a Bush
administration, but the GOP had prepared for that possibility by
assigning party activists to every Florida county for the specific
purpose of screaming fraud. Another very close vote accompanied by
frenzied controversy would make the Consortium ballot study just a
tiresome repeat of the soap opera that most of election-weary America
had already seen and turned off.
If the establishment deep thinkers were right, then the only possible
results from the Consortium study could help legitimize Bush, but
could not harm his legitimacy among those Americans who had gotten
over it.
There was, however, a potential complication that had been discounted
by the corporations that were financing this venture:
What would happen if the Consortium recount revealed that Gore had won
decisively?
The NORCs examination of the ballots began in February.
MakeThemAccountable has spoken with several participants who were in
the NORC coding rooms where the ballots of the Florida presidential
election were reviewed. These people did not know each other and were
in different counties within Florida. Each of them independently
stated that, based on their personal observation, Al Gore was winning
at least two thirds of those disputed ballots that NORC coders were
recording. These were ballots that had not been included in previous
recounts.
The Consortium has stated that it cannot possibly have known the
outcome of the ballot coding because NORC did not generate a final
tabulation. The Consortium even contends that, because the ballots
were not delivered to the media organizations until mid-September, and
because those organizations have been completely preoccupied with
covering the war against terrorism, the result of the recount is still
a complete mystery to them.
The Consortium is lying about this, as well as other things.
Our sources within the recount made a commitment of confidentiality to
NORC, pledging that they would not go public with what they saw during
the process. This pact was faithfully honored until after September
11, when some participants became alarmed that the Consortium was
going to violate its commitment to inform the American public about
the truth of the actual results.
The ballot examination process, or coding process, had teams
consisting of an NORC employee supervising three coders. It was the
job of the coders to identify the characteristics of any expression of
voter intent on the ballots. Their observations were entered into a
computer database so that the media organizations comprising the
Consortium could later evaluate the data to determine the winner. The
ballots showed only numbers and not the names of candidates, so NORC
assumed that those who were evaluating the ballots did not know which
candidate was getting which votes. . The supervisors were responsible
for comparing the pattern of vote tabulation by each coder, to further
insure that bias would not enter the process.
In an interview with MakeThemAccountable, NORC Public Information
Officer Julie Antelman confirmed that, if someone knew which number
applied to which candidate, then they could tell if there was a trend.
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.
From the first day of the NORC process, there was a visible presence
of pro-Bush demonstrators outside the coding rooms. What has not been
widely reported is that there was also a constant Bush presence inside
the coding rooms. The NORC had a policy that allowed for a
representative of either party to observe the process. In counties
like Hernando, observers could pay in order to actually sit at the
coding tables. The observer was not allowed to comment, intrude, or
interact with the coders, or in any way seek to influence the ballot
study.
There is no evidence that the partisan observers corrupted the process
of coding ballots, but their presence certainly destroys the myth of
an unknowable result. Inside the rooms of the NORC coding process,
politically experienced G.O.P. operatives carefully watched for
trends.
They saw bad news for Bush. For example, in Republican Lake County,
election officials had disqualified six hundred ballots because voters
put a pencil mark in the circle by a candidate's name and also wrote
the same candidate's name on another part of the ballot. According to
the G.O.P., this made it impossible to discern the voters intent.
The coders perceived that someone who checked a candidates name and
also wrote in the same candidates name probably meant to vote for that
candidate.
The Republicans screamed that no one could possibly know for certain
which candidate the voter meant to choose in these instances unless
they were psychic. They decried the NORCs pathetic attempts at mind
reading.
The G.O.P.s high decibel cries of persecution had successfully
intimidated officials at the previous Florida recounts, but the rules
of the NORC coding session prohibited observers from emoting inside
the rooms. The indignant Republicans had to go outside to vent. The
net result was a gain of one hundred thirty votes for Gore using
previously uncounted ballots in just one Republican county.
George W. Bush had a widespread presence of people actively looking
after his interests. There were Republican protesters outside the
coding rooms and Republican observers inside the coding rooms in every
county.
The Gore organization had already disbanded.
As during the election and the recounts, the Republicans were fighting
as hard as they could no holds barred while the Democrats defaulted.
Even so, during the Consortium ballot study the coders just found too
many Gore votes for the G.O.P. to be able to win again by invoking
invisible crimes and decrying nonexistent conspiracies.
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.
The members of the Consortium have a sufficient interest in this
matter that they collectively have paid millions of dollars to
subsidize the ballot study. The media organizations that comprise the
Consortium employ hundreds of experienced journalists who possess
expertise in gathering information. A number of their most able
journalists were eyewitnesses to what was happening in the coding
rooms. And yet, the Consortium pleads total ignorance of who was
gaining votes during the NORC coding process.
Dan Keating was the Washington Post on-site editor for the ballot
study. In an interview with MakeThemAccountable, he said, We
intentionally blinded ourselves to the information.
Some coders knew enough about Florida county ballot configuration to
be able to tell which numerical code represented Bush and which
identified Gore. The same was true of supervisors, private citizens
who viewed the study, and the increasingly hysterical Republican
observers. Non-Consortium journalists were not exactly clueless,
either:
The media are finding more ballots meant for Gore. In election-speak:
Even though final statewide results aren't in, early returns favor
Gore.
Palm Beach Post
http://www.gopbi.com/partners/pbpost/news/election2000_media.html
The outrageous contention by the Consortium that they could not
possibly have known the outcome of the ballot study is just one of the
blatant lies they have told in their continuing effort to finesse a
pro-Gore result that they didnt anticipate, that runs counter to their
financial interests, and that they had apparently chosen to
indefinitely delay even before the terrorist attack on September 11.
Next Part Three: More Consortium Dishonesty, which will be followed by
an examination of the mainstream medias financial motivations in lying
for Bush. We will look at the concerns of some that the current delay
in releasing the results foreshadows another convoluted attempt by the
mainstream media to award Bush the victory that was denied him by the
voters. We will also reveal which famed captain of industry mobilized
the media elite to rally behind Bush in 2000.
THE MEDIA COVER-UP OF THE GORE VICTORY
PART THREE: HITTING THE JACKPOT
By Carolyn Kay and David Podvin
In 2001, the natural gas industry enjoyed the spectacular benefits
that resulted from both deregulation and the passive consent of a
president who was an uncritical bystander as gas companies gouged the
consumers of California for over twenty billion dollars in coerced
lucre. It was the ultimate dream come true for every greedy business
executive who had ever contributed to a presidential campaign. Kenneth
Lay, chairman of the natural gas giant Enron and George W. Bushs
single biggest financial supporter, converted political donations of
hundreds of thousands of dollars into unregulated windfall profits of
billions of dollars. He did it by buying the allegiance of an elected
official who was supposed to be looking out for the public good.
Lay was so convinced of his ownership rights in the Bush
administration that he personally called the new chairman of the
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, who told The New York Times that
Mr. Lay, a close friend of President Bush's, offered him a deal: If he
changed his views on electricity deregulation, Enron would continue to
support him in his new job. This appointee has since resigned. As
calculated by the Center for Responsive Politics (opensecrets.org),
the return on investment for energy companies for supporting Bush has
been 52,200 percent ($36,352,000,000 in tax breaks and subsidies
divided by $69,500,000 in campaign contributions).
Not a bad return at all.
Lay was not the only corporate executive who ingratiated himself to
George W. Bush during the 2000 campaign with the intention of riding
the deregulation gravy train once Bush was in office.
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 worthyour companys,
and your own. Your compensation package is structured so that
significant increases in your companys 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 know that George W. Bush, son of a former president and a graduate
of Yale University and the Harvard Business School, is running on the
most pro-business platform since Calvin Coolidge. As governor of
Texas, he kept the costs of polluters down with a program of voluntary
compliance with environmental rules, and he made certain that
regulatory agencies gave favorable treatment to his campaign
contributors. He also cut taxes drastically, both for businesses and
for wealthy individuals. Your confidence in him is greatly enhanced by
the knowledge that, in every situation that contrasted the interests
of big business with the common good, Bush sided with corporations.
You have been advised of the people Bush will appoint to key
governmental positions like the Federal Communications Commission, and
you know that they will reduce regulations that now keep you from
expanding your media empire, thereby creating great predatory
opportunities for your company and yourself.
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. There will be spectacular profits to be
made just by eliminating the rule that prohibited corporations from
owning both newspapers and TV stations in the same market. Under Bush,
your ability to increase the size and power of your media holdings
will be accompanied by the pricing leverage that can only come with
monopolizing an essential service in a geographic area.
Al Gore, on the other hand, is the son of a wealthy tobacco farmer and
U.S. Senator. He has rather anti-business views. Known as a fairly
deep thinker and an energetic doer, though somewhat stiff and formal
in situations where he feels uncomfortable, he wrote a book that
identified him as a passionate environmentalist. Gore believes in
governmental regulation to protect workers, to force businesses to pay
a minimum wage, and to protect the environment His social conscience
would cost businesses like yours a great deal of money.
You are aware that Gore opposes deregulation of the communications
industry. You know he believes that the federal government should have
an active role in protecting the public against actions by your
company that might be profitable for you but harmful to society. He
steadfastly opposed concentrating media power in just a few hands,
including yours.
You consider your media subsidiaries to be like any other aspect of
your enterprise They exist to maximize your profits.
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.
Using our 20-20 hindsight, let us look at a few of the actions and
proposals made by the Bush administration, after only nine months in
office, that will benefit you and your corporation.
Cabinet appointments and lower level staffers who are generally
businesspeople, and often opponents of the objectives of the very
agency they have been chosen to head. Your company will profit by
reduction in government oversight over its activities.
A bankruptcy bill that makes it harder for ordinary people to go
bankrupt, even if their burden of debt was caused by loss of a job or
huge medical bills due to catastrophic illness. Your company, if it
does any lending, will profit. GE, for example, owns both NBC and the
GE Financial Network.
Repeal of workplace ergonomic rules that would keep workers from
suffering repetitive-stress injuries. Your company will profit by not
having to buy special furniture or design special workspaces for
workers.
Killing the rules that allowed government officials to consider
whether a business has broken the law in the past, before awarding it
a government contract. Your company will profit if you consider
breaking the law, and paying fines if you are caught, merely a cost of
doing business. Companies like GE, for example, about whom GE Workers
United wrote, It is not surprising that the Project on Government
Oversight has cited GE as having defrauded the U.S. government 16
times in the 1990s, by far the largest number of any company.
Proposing to partially privatize Social Security. Your company will
presumably profit (no specifics have yet been proposed) by paying a
reduced employer portion to FICA. If you are GE, you will benefit
further since privatization is expected to be a bonanza for mutual
funds. GE Capital Services is one of your subsidiaries.
Giving a tax cut to the very richest Americans, even though the cut
may endanger the Social Security pensions of the Baby Boomers. You,
who are most likely paid tens of millions of dollars a year, will
personally profit considerably.
A proposal to reduce the capital gains tax. Since most of your
compensation consists of stock options, you will pay much less tax on
the money you gain from selling your stock.
Because you run a media company, however, probably the most important
action taken by the Bush administration was the appointment of Michael
Powell, son of Secretary of State Colin Powell, as head of the Federal
Communications Commission (FCC). Powell has never seen a merger that
he doesnt like. As a commissioner of the FCC, he participated in the
decision to allow the AOL/Time Warner merger, even though he had a
conflict of interest because his father was a member of the AOL Board
of Directors at the time, and holder of a significant number AOL stock
options. Commenting on a rule that a single company may not own
stations that reach more than 35% of households, Powell said, There is
something offensive to First Amendment values about that limitation.
Never mind the offenses to the First Amendment committed by the
concentrated media we see today, where heads of news divisions are
indistinguishable from the suits in the home office, and where the
bottom line is all that matters.
Even though six companies already own half of all communication media,
you see many more lucrative outlets that you want to acquire. With
further deregulation, your company can make billions more dollars by
mergers and acquisitions. You dont even have to do the hard work of
creating new lines of business. You can just buy them. You can reduce
costs by centralizing certain functions. And the more media products
you have, the more easily you can cross promote them.
Mel Karmazin of Viacom/CBS has been the master of cross promotion of
products throughout his company: The top songs on an Viacom subsidiary
Infinity radio station playlist dovetail with what is being shown on
Viacom subsidiary MTV, which coincides with what songs appear on
Viacom subsidiary Paramount movie soundtracks, which parallels the
singers that are profiled on Viacom subsidiary CBS news and
entertainment programs. This omnipresent cross promotion creates
media-as-perpetual-commercial, public interest be damned, with the
multiplier effect increasing as the conglomerate expands.
Under Bush, the pace of the hugely profitable cross promotion movement
would be allowed to greatly accelerate.
If your company has broadcast outlets, deregulation is even more
important to you.
Freedom from public service requirements would allow you to
broadcast only those programs that make the most money. Forget
childrens programming. Forget giving time to political candidates. An
added benefit of giving political candidates less airtime is that you
force them to buy more advertising, thereby adding to your profits.
Freedom from language, sex, or violence restrictions would enable
you to air any programming that earns ratings, now matter how vile,
without fear of being fined. Karmazins golden goose Howard Stern would
have no restrictions whatever on his language or his actions.
Freedom from restrictions on ownership of news dissemination outlets
in one city would allow you to promote your political point of view in
entire markets, without any competition for those views.
As a media executive, your concern is not the disadvantages that
deregulation would inure to the general public. The pursuit of profits
at the expense of journalistic integrity and editorial quality has had
certain consequences for them, as well.
Staff reductions in the service of ever more profits have resulted
in less investigative reporting, and lower quality of the reporting
that does exist. Reporters and editors rely more on press releases as
sources of information, but lack the resources to check the facts
asserted in them.
A mentality of caring for ratings above all cheapens news reporting,
dumbs it down, and causes an increase in reporting on celebrities.
Advertisers are king in this environment. If they do not like a
topic, that topic is not published or aired, even if it is something
the public needs to understand in order to make informed decisions at
the polls.
The more concentrated the industry, the less likely news outlets are
to initiate investigative reports about one another. And your news
division does not investigate other subsidiaries of your conglomerate.
Editors know that they have to be careful how they report on certain
people because you socialize with the people your journalists cover.
Reportedly, Katherine Graham once kept a story critical of Henry
Kissinger from being published in her newspaper, the Washington Post,
until after she had hosted a dinner party in his honor.
According to Jerold M. Starr, writing on the website TomPaine.com,
famed retired broadcaster Walter Cronkite has complained that news
executives are helpless when top management demands an increase in
ratings to protect profits. No wonder Americans are watching and
reading mainstream media less and less.
You do not have to tell the reporters and editors who work for your
media empire how to report the news the way you want to see it. You
are much more subtle than that. If you are Jack Welch, CEO of GE
during this time, you make examples of certain people. Tim Russert,
for example, pleases you. He calls the Bush campaigns opposition
research team every few days to find out what dirt they have invented
about Al Gore lately. And he reports their lies as fact. You publicly
praise Russert. You make certain that everyone knows you have
personally rewarded him with a multi-million dollar contract.. He is a
daily reminder to his colleagues of the benefits of being an obedient
employee
Claire Shipman is another story, however. You are not happy with her.
Her assignment is to cover the Gore campaign, but in your opinion her
reporting is too favorable to the Vice President. You chew her out
publicly. Her departure from your newsroom sends a powerful message to
those who remain.
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.
Still assuming that you are Jack Welch, you met with Bush at the
beginning of his administration to give him your advice regarding
economic policy. You had input into an energy policy that recommends
use of nuclear power, and building of nuclear plants, one of your
companys lines of business. Bush even nominated Francis S. Blake,
formerly your Senior Vice President for Corporate Business
Development, as Deputy Secretary of the Department of Energy.
George Bush supported your bid to merge with the large European
computer company Honeywell. The deal did not go through only because
it was stopped by the EEU.
The Bush administration has ordered a cleanup of the Hudson River, to
be paid for by GE. But before the election GE had every reason to
believe it would not be forced to pay the $460 million cost of the
cleanup. According to the CNN AllPolitics website, GE thought it had a
deal, says an industry lobbyist. After all, James Connaughton, a
lawyer who represented GE in Superfund legal fights, was appointed by
Bush to head the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
Welchs reaction: GE is paying the price for Kyoto and arsenic. He
understood that Bush wanted to come through for GE, but political
pressure from those in his own party, including the governor of New
York, prevented it. Still, the former GE chairman is ecstatic about
his favorite politicians performance thus far: President Bush has done
a great job, said Welch. Hes even exceeded the expectations of those
of us who supported him.
That support was in part financial. According to GE Workers United, GE
uses its enormous political war chest to lobby for greater corporate
welfare and fewer benefits for ordinary American citizens. The Center
for Responsive Politics reported that GE contributed almost a million
dollars to the GOP in 2000. However, a far more valuable contribution
was the fawning pro-Bush coverage on NBC News. This began with NBC
dutifully repeating Bush campaign slurs against John McCain in the
Republican primaries, and continued nonstop through the post-election
Florida contest when Tim Russert demanded that Al Gore concede even
before the votes were recounted.
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 theres 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.
In business, wise decisions are defined as those that create wealth.
It does not matter in the least to a hardheaded businessperson that
the majority of those who voted in the 2000 presidential campaign
voted for Al Gore. It does not matter that the issues Al Gore
supported are the issues supported by large majorities of the American
people. It does not matter that the views of the majority are
increasingly unrepresented in the mainstream media.
As A. J. Liebling once observed, Freedom of the press is guaranteed to
anyone who owns one.
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. Your industry has demonstrated a willingness to do what is
necessary to keep Bush politically healthy, sometimes in spite of
himself. It is so important to your financial interests that he
remains popular enough to effectively promote your agenda that nothing
he says or does merits the pummeling you applied to his uncooperative
predecessor. Looking at the coverage of Bush that you and your fellow
media titans provide to the American people, no one would ever suspect
that your favorite politician has been at the helm of a nine month
transformation from peace and prosperity to war and recession.
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.
The media conglomerates chose sides in the 2000 election based on the
one and only thing that matters to multinational corporations profit.
They accurately determined that George W. Bush was the candidate who
would best allow them to maximize that profit. They have a huge
financial stake in the political well being of Bush. And now, they
have the results of a ballot study in Florida that unexpectedly shows
a decisive victory for Al Gore.
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.
Sources
Janine Jackson, Their Man in Washington, Fairness and Accuracy in
Media, October 2001
Jerold M. Starr, Needed: An Independent Public Broadcasting Service,
TomPaine.com, October 5, 2001
GE Workers United, General Electric and Corporate Political Influence,
geworkersunited.org, June 2001
Jeffrey Kluger, Here comes the dredge, CNN.com, undated
Media Research Center, NBC News Cheering for Gore, August 28, 2001
Danny Schechter, Where Have All The Muckrakers Gone?,
mediachannel.org, October 3, 2001
Martin Lewis, This May Be a Pre-Mortem of the 2000 Campaign, Time,
Nov. 03, 2000
Media Whores Online, The Welch-Russert Connection, undated
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 worlds 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.
Since the beginning of the country, it has been considered appropriate
for the business community to exercise its right to aggressively
support the candidate that best represented its interests. The new
dimension that Welch introduced was the concept that the mainstream
media should aggressively advance the political agenda of the
corporations that own it. He did not see any difference between
corporate journalism and corporate manufacturing or corporate service
industries. Business was business, and the difference between winners
and losers was profit, whether you were selling nuclear power or ads
on the network news. From Welchs perspective, it was insanity, not to
mention bad business practice, for the corporate owners of the
mainstream media to restrain themselves from using all of their assets
to promote their financial well being.
In general, he saw corporate news organizations as untapped political
resources that should be freed from the burden of objectivity.
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.
In 1988, NBC News president Lawrence Grossman insisted to Welch that
news was a public trust and should not be subjected to the same
pressure to make profits that was applied to other GE units. Welch
fired him.
In 1999, the GE chairman decided that it was no longer good enough for
NBC News to just be profitable. Seven years of a frequently
uncooperative Democratic Administration, combined with the
Rove-inspired vision of spectacular profits through deregulation, now
motivated Welch to take action.
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 Welchs point of view, the corporate news organizations were not
living up to their potential.
The mainstream media could make George W. Bush president.
That would be good for Americans who believed in free markets and the
merit system, Welch said.
Better yet, it would help to make General Electric even more
successful and dominant, which had been Welchs obsession for decades.
Jack Welch believed that, despite earning millions annually in salary
and bonuses, he was the most underpaid employee at GE. From the time
he started running the company in 1981 to the end of 1999, the stock's
total return (price appreciation and dividends) had been seven
thousand percent. Given the brilliance of that performance, how could
he possibly be overpaid, or even fairly paid? From Welchs perspective,
it was the pennies-per-hour workers in General Electrics Asian
sweatshops who were overpaid, because their individual contributions
to the big picture were so meager.
The philosopher Ayn Rand wrote, The actual performance of men in
society is a constant, fierce, undefined struggle between the genius
and the parasite
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.
The country would be run for the benefit of the A people who achieved
great things, not the C people who merely existed. In such a laissez
faire environment, the powerful would be unshackled to become even
more powerful, and no corporation in the world was more powerful than
General Electric.
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 shes 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.
He had previously personally reviewed the launch of CNBC. He now
turned his attention to reforming the editorial content of NBC News.
Welch had already secured his place as one of the business titans of
the twentieth century. He expressed few regrets to confidantes, but he
was wistful about his belief that GE would have made even more money
if NBC News had just been tougher on a politically vulnerable Arkansas
governor in 1992. With only about two years left prior to his
mandatory retirement, one of Jack Welchs last significant
contributions would be to permanently eliminate the irrational belief
that corporate journalists should ever be allowed to act in a way that
damaged the corporate balance sheet.
For public consumption, he said the obligatory things about GEs
commitment to journalistic integrity and independence. Privately, he
saw only two differences between his employees who reported the news
and those who made toasters: one, the toaster makers were less full of
shit, and, two, the journalists were not working in the best interests
of the GE team.
This second point infuriated him. It galled Welch to hear what he
considered to be holier-than-thou pronouncements of personal moral
superiority coming from journalists whom he viewed to be inferior to
himself in just about every conceivable way. GE signed their
paychecks, and then in the name of journalistic integrity and
independence, they reported things that damaged the company. NBC News
had even publicized that the federal government caught a GE defense
subsidiary stealing massive amounts of taxpayer money. From the Welch
perspective, tolerating this kind of insubordination was crazy. He did
not view reporters as guardians of the truth or gatekeepers of
democracy; for the most part, he saw them as leftist slackasses.
Welch was absolutely determined to make his employees at NBC News
finally genuflect to the most sacred words in his vocabulary: GE
bottom line.
He perceived that there was a widely believed American myth of
well-intended journalists selflessly seeking the truth, and that there
would be hell to pay if a business leader like him were to overtly
force reporters to be good corporate soldiers. So, being a very bright
guy, he largely left the journalists at NBC alone.
Publicly.
In private, 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 MSNBCs 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. And her managing editor, Tom Brokaw, did
not stand up for her right to journalistic independence from the
corporate lord.
I think Jack Welchs the smartest boss Ive ever had and he signs my
paychecks, said Brokaw, exhibiting a profound understanding of the
situation.
Over the years, Welch had occasionally interfered with NBC News.
During the 1987 stock market crash, he ordered Grossman to forbid his
journalists from using the term Black Monday out of concern that a
panic by investors would depress GE stock.
Welch has an explosive temper. When the chairman exploded at Shipman,
Brokaw knew that, from the standpoint of journalistic integrity, the
managing editor was obligated to rush to his reporters defense. Brokaw
also knew that, from the standpoint of self-preservation, it was wise
for the managing editor to obediently defer to the man who signed his
paychecks.
The Welch mission was to tame the rest of them at NBC News, and to do
so in a way that did not cause any journalistic prima donnas to
attract unwanted public attention by openly revolting. Beyond that,
Welch hoped to quietly convince other media conglomerates that the
great visionary (himself) was once again in the vanguard of an
exciting and highly profitable corporate trend: the total destruction
of any wall that separated the newsroom from the boardroom.
Welch decided that the key factor in bringing the corporate newsrooms
into line would be to change the process through which journalists
were compensated and promoted. When he took over at GE, Welch believed
that the way in which people were being advanced rewarded mediocrity.
The unworthy candidates were being weeded out, but so were the most
worthy. As in many companies, managers were hesitant to promote highly
gifted subordinates who could later become rivals.
Welch has repeatedly been named the most admired executive in America,
an assessment that he considered to be valid years before anyone
outside GE had heard of him. His supreme self-confidence allowed him
to demand that the best and the brightest be promoted, secure in the
knowledge that no one could possibly be better or brighter than Jack
Welch. As a result of aggressive management training that cost
hundreds of millions of dollars, GE developed the strongest stable of
managers in corporate America.
Welch believed that the promotion practices at NBC News encouraged
disloyalty to General Electric. It was his observation that
journalistic excellence seemed to be the flimsy, intangible standard
for getting ahead in the news division. He decided that the criteria
had to be changed to encourage loyal contributions to the employer,
which was GE. The crucial step that Welch took was to make it well
known throughout NBC News that the standard for the promotion of
journalists would be the same as it was for every other employee in
the corporation: outstanding contribution to the financial well being
of General Electric.
The journalists who had their paychecks signed by Welch knew that
favorable coverage of George W. Bush would be considered an
outstanding contribution to the financial well being of General
Electric.
In fairness, it should be noted that Jack Welch did not believe he was
doing anything wrong by covertly maneuvering news coverage in favor of
Bush. Apparently, Jack Welch has never believed that he was doing
anything wrong.
Author William Greider documented the criminal and civil record of
General Electric during the late 1980s and early nineties. Over a five
year period, Jack Welchs company attempted to pay a $1.25 million
bribe to a Puerto Rican official for a $92 million dollar power plant
contract and three GE executives were imprisoned as a result; GE
defrauded the army on a $254 million contract for battlefield
computers and paid tens of millions of dollars in fines; GE allegedly
overcharged the army for battle tank parts and paid a $900,000
settlement; GE paid a $32 million settlement for discriminating
against women and minorities; GE defrauded the air force on a missile
contract and paid $1 million in fines; GE was identified as being
responsible for at least 47 Superfund toxic cleanup sites; GE paid a
$3 million settlement for allegedly altering labor vouchers in order
to overcharge the Pentagon on jet engine contracts; and GE paid an
undisclosed amount for knowingly selling defective nuclear reactor
parts.
The scandals for Welch and General Electric continued through this
year. Since 1992, GE has been forced to pay hundreds of millions of
dollars in court judgments and fines for endangering Americans by
illegally and repeatedly dumping toxic waste and chemicals, stealing
from the military, operating unsafe workplaces, engaging in deceptive
advertising, contaminating the Hudson and Housatonic Rivers, selling
defective nuclear reactor parts (again), allowing safety violations at
a fuel fabrication plant, polluting the air and contaminating the soil
and groundwater in several states, creating asbestos-related health
hazards in England, contaminating drinking water in Puerto Rico and
bribing the Puerto Rico Water Resources Authority, polluting several
northeastern states with PCBs, overcharging on mortgage insurance,
practicing money laundering and unfair debt collection, bribing a
foreign government, and knowingly broadcasting a phony news story. The
company also had to admit that it invented three hundred fifty million
dollars in nonexistent profits.
This is a partial list of the illegal activities perpetrated by
General Electric under the leadership of Jack Welch. Mr. Welch claimed
that the quickest way for a GE employee to get fired was to commit an
integrity violation. Employees who committed the integrity violation
of missing an earnings target usually did get fired; those who
committed the integrity violations listed in the preceding two
paragraphs rarely got fired.
Americas most admired executive prided himself on knowing every aspect
of his company, but he also passionately declared that he was ignorant
of all wrongdoing by his company. The leader who micromanaged GE to
the point of insisting on reviewing the scripts for refrigerator
commercials contends that he only learned after the fact that General
Electric was constantly committing serious crimes.
Following the conversation with Rove, Welch instructed a subordinate
to impress on senior NBC executives that the news division would now
be expected to show the same unqualified devotion to General Electric
that was required of every other unit. He was unusually circumspect
because he realized that Clinton appointees in the Federal
Communications Commission would have taken a dim view of his
activities. Welch knew from his companys countless run-ins with the
law that the authorities could be outmaneuvered if things were handled
with finesse.
He quietly began to dramatically change the way that things were done
at NBC News. A link was established between the producers of the
Sunday morning program Meet The Press and the opposition research team
of the Republican Party. Delighted G.O.P. operatives were soon
boasting that Tim Russert would go on the air just minutes after
receiving their allegations of wrongdoing by Al Gore, and would repeat
their charges verbatim. Russert was not functioning as a journalist;
he had crossed the Rubicon and was acting as a mouthpiece for General
Electrics favorite political party.
Welch greatly appreciated Russert, whose multi-million dollar contract
he personally negotiated. The message circulated throughout NBC News
that Russert was an excellent role model for reporters who wanted to
succeed in the organization. Reporters at NBC News did not have to be
verbally instructed on how to get ahead; they clearly saw that the
Russert approach was handsomely rewarded by top management.
Reporter Andrea Mitchell of NBC Nightly News was married to Federal
Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan, who was a longtime Republican
and protigi of Ayn Rand. Mitchell was a Welch favorite because he
liked her objectivity, which meant that she never had a positive word
to say about Democrats. After the election, it was Mitchell who
repeatedly lied when reporting that Clinton aides had vandalized the
White House and stolen from Air Force One. Bush operatives were later
quoted as saying that the phony vandalism story was a big help in
creating the desired contrast between the sleazy Clinton years and the
breath of fresh air that George W. Bush wanted to represent. Mitchell
never retracted or apologized when the Government Accounting Office
proved that she had been dishonest, and she was never disciplined.
There is also no evidence of Mitchell ever being angrily confronted by
Jack Welch.
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. Robert Wright had previously been appointed by Welch to
run NBC. Welch assigned him and his fellow GE board member, money
center bank executive Sandy Warner, to use their contacts in
broadcasting and finance. They quietly encouraged the executives of
the mainstream media organizations to rethink the relationship between
news divisions and business objectives.
Wright offered the carrot. Usually through underlings, he contacted
the executives of Americas most influential media conglomerates. Bush
held a huge post-impeachment lead over Gore in the early presidential
polls. The executives were told that Bush was going to have a massive
advantage in campaign finances, and that he was almost certainly going
to be elected president. Under a Bush administration, the big media
outfits would be free to prosper as never before, because the federal
government would cease to put limitations on their operations and
expansion. A Bush administration would mean untold riches for the
industry.
Wright was also the former chief executive of GE Capital, a money
center powerhouse that contributes more than a third of GEs profits,
and would be the nations twentieth largest corporation as a
stand-alone company. He knew that General Electric would win big, even
when it was not directly involved in the inevitable media mega-mergers
that were certain to be approved by a Bush administration. According
to Fortune Magazine, Capital's growth comes in many forms, but nothing
equals the bottom-line boost of a big acquisition. GE would make huge
profits by purchasing media conglomerates and by financing the deals
of others.
Warner and his associates wielded the stick. As chairman of banking
institution J.P. Morgan, he had great credibility when he argued that
the key to winning the media competition in a laissez faire Bush era
would be access to investment capital for the purpose of acquiring
competitors. Those who had the best relationships with the big
international banks, brokerage houses, and investment banking firms
would be the predators; those who had trouble raising money would be
the prey.
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.
They did not have to use pressure tactics to convince Mel Karmazin of
Viacom/CBS. Karmazin had always viewed news as an underprofitable
millstone around the neck of the entertainment division. His vision
was to make Viacom a vast network of interlocking media interests that
would cross promote their products in order to maximize profit. Though
CBS News had a reputation for being more liberal than its
counterparts, Karmazins only political objective was to expand his
business. The prospect of having an administration that would allow
him to build an empire without interference was compelling.
Karmazin was also excited by assurances that Bush would appoint an
ineffectual lackey to head the Federal Communications Commission.
Karmazins Infinity Broadcasting had been acquired by CBS in the deal
that gave him operational control of the entire network. Over the
years, the FCC had fined Infinity millions of dollars because of the
profane and lewd behavior of Karmazins most profitable broadcaster,
Howard Stern. The Stern broadcasts generated massive profits and
wonderful cross promotion, so the fines could have been viewed as the
cost of doing a phenomenally profitable business. However, the painful
aspect to Karmazin were the delays in approving broadcast mergers that
occurred because FCC commissioners were alienated by Sterns scornful
defiance of them. Karmazin seethed at being harangued by the federal
government just because his meal ticket spewed profane and racist
epithets over the public airwaves, and performed social services like
arranging for a high school boy to attend his prom with a porn star
whose claim to fame was having intercourse with five hundred men in
one day.
Millions of Americans supported Bush because they believed he would
promote family values; Karmazin threw the support of CBS News behind
Bush on the basis that family values were a campaign mirage, and that
Bush had no intention of implementing them into public policy. While
Bush has been president, Stern has continued to shout the same
vulgarities and peddle the same sleaze over the air, but the intense
pressure that was applied by the FCC during the Democratic era has not
continued during the family values administration.
Karmazin personally contributed a thousand dollars each to the
presidential campaigns of Vice President Al Gore and John McCain, who
was the Senate chairman of the Commerce Committee before which Viacom
would have to do business.
The contribution that George W. Bush received from Mel Karmazin was
infinitely more valuable: uncritical coverage by CBS News. When Bush
stumbled and lost the New Hampshire primary, and when he repeatedly
tripped over his invented facts in the first debate, and even when he
staggered at the very end of the campaign after having been caught
lying about his drunk driving arrest, the adjective that CBS News
reporters most frequently used to describe him was likeable.
The attitude at ABC was an extension of the personality of Disney
Chairman Michael Eisner. Eisner does not like those who make waves, as
the host of Politically Incorrect recently learned. After Bill Maher
said that it was cowardly of America to fight battles by launching
missiles from a safe distance, Eisner went out of his way to very
publicly slap Maher down. This episode provided outsiders with a rare
glimpse inside the corporate culture of the happy company that Mickey
Mouse built: do not rock the boat or youre in trouble. Eisner will
always stand up for principle, no matter what the cost, says a former
Disney executive, as long as that principle involves increasing his
personal compensation.
As a result, the candidate who held out the prospect of fabulous
wealth for the broadcast industry got favorable coverage from ABC
News.
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