What Economic Bias?
The 2000 Election
Florida

excerpted from the book

What Liberal Media?

The Truth About Bias and the News

by Eric Alterman

Basic Books, 2003, paper

p120
... before the days of Osama bin Laden, it was difficult to find a topic that so inspired the media's universal anger and disgust as the individual anti-freetrade/unfettered globalization protester. Three-time Pulitzer winner Tom Friedman of the New York Times is a brilliant foreign affairs columnist whose views cannot easily ~e pigeonholed as "liberal" or "conservative." But when writing about trade, Friedman morphs into the equivalent of a Howard Stern for the Council on Foreign Relations set, terming opponents to the World Trade Organization to be "a Noah's ark of fiat-earth advocates, protectionist trade unions and yuppies looking for their 1960's fix," who had somehow been "duped by knaves like Pat Buchanan." Here, Friedman could barely outdo the editors of the Wall Street Journal, who preferred the appellation, "Luddite wackos." Like many who write about the topic, New Republic senior editor Franklin Foer lumped together those who question free trade with garden-variety xenophobia on the traditionally anti-Semitic right, as he described the "one group that shares the Buchananite docket of suspicions-of Wall Street, capitalism, Zionism, American power: the anti-globalization left."

Now, most intelligent people view globalization as a complicated process tying together nations, corporations, science, technology, disease, governance, problems, and solutions. In many contexts, the process is simply irresistible, no matter what anybody thinks about it. Hence, there can be no sensible "anti-globalization" position. But this does not imply that the current path mapped out by U.S. elites to manage the transition to a globalized world is the only conceivable one or even the best one for America and the world.

Sticking to mainstream coverage, readers would be hard-pressed to learn that any intelligent person anywhere had any questions on this point. Hence, one would also have trouble making sense of so many world developments that, according to the gospel of the Washington "free trade/free investment" consensus, should not be happening. Yet they are. For instance, free-trade globalization is no way out of poverty for workers in, say, Bangladesh-the world's fourth-largest garment producer for the United States market-who earn, on average, one and six-tenths cents for each "Harvard" baseball cap they sew. (At the Harvard Co-op in Cambridge, the caps sell for $17.) Each year Americans buy 924 million garments and other textile items made in Bangladesh. But the workers there still do not earn the thirty-four cents an hour they say they need to care for their own children.

Such problems are hardly unique. While free trade has obviously been extremely beneficial to many groups in many countries, statistics indicate that during the past two decades both Africa and much of southern Asia are poorer today than they were forty years ago, particularly when one factors in the destruction of natural resources, as Cambridge University economics professor Partha Dasgupta has demonstrated. A collection of economists at Washington's Center for Economic and Policy Research came up with a "Scorecard on Globalization 1980-2000," comparing those decades to the previous two decades. The news was not good. Growth was slowing down, particularly in the poorest countries, and progress in the crucial areas of life expectancy and infant mortality was shrinking, compared with earlier gains. So too, in most places, had the rate of growth in school enrollment slowed. These are the keys to self-sufficiency and long-term growth.

Columbia University Professor Joseph Stiglitz was the chair of Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers, chief economist at the World Bank, and winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in economics. With the possible and only partial exception of the New York Times' pundit Paul Krugman, there is not a journalist alive who comes close to matching Stiglitz's credentials. Yet, Stiglitz wrote, "If globalization continues to be conducted in the way that it has been in the past, if we continue to fail to learn from our mistakes, globalization will not only not succeed in promoting development but will continue to create poverty and instability." For decades, he noted, endorsing the same protests that journalists so roundly condemn, "The cries of the poor in Africa and in developing countries in other parts of the world have been largely unheard in the West," and it was only the street protesters "who have put the need for reform on the agenda of the developed world." And yet while these views are apparently sufficiently sensible for a man like Stiglitz to espouse, they meet with nothing but undisguised contempt from those who report and comment on this subject in America's elite media.

p122
An entire money-loving journalistic structure grew up around the prosperity of the Nineties and the market boom that inspired it. The boom itself, as we all know, would prove to be heavily skewed toward the wealthiest Americans. As Kevin Phillips noted in his 2002 book, Wealth and Democracy, "While more and more people owned stock during the period, most of these had tiny stakes; with fewer than half owning more in their portfolios than in their cars." Meanwhile, "the top 1% pocketed 42% of the stockmarket gains between 1989 and 1997, while the top 10% of the population took 86%." The audience with a significant stake in the stock market was therefore by definition a wealthy one-the kind after whom advertisers naturally lust. News organizations were particularly eager to cultivate it, shifting programming to the kind of fare that would be likely to attract them and flatter their worldview.

p124
By 2002 pay for the top CEO averaged $10 million a year while employee pay averaged a mere $25,466. The result was a relative rise in the top guy's pay, from an average of seventy times worker wages in 1985 to 410 times worker wages in 2002. Rarely in our nation's history had issues of equity fallen quite so far off the table. Levels of wealth concentration during this period came to mirror those that preceded the 1929 stock market crash. What's more, the United States is nearly unique among industrial democracies in this regard. The top fifth of Americans make 11 times more than the bottom fifth, compared to ratios of 4.3 in Japan, 7.1 in Canada and France, and 9.6 in the United Kingdom. It would be unfair to say these trends went entirely ignored by all major media during the 1990s, but I doubt if even the most enthusiastic media defenders would wish to argue that they received any more than a minute fraction of the attention paid to millionaires, wealth-creators, and the personalities behind the rise of the now deflated Internet bubble. How could it be otherwise in a media in which, on the network news in 2001 alone, the ratio of corporate executive appearances to those of organized labor was more than thirty to one?

This bias is evident virtually everywhere, even in alleged bastions of left-liberalism like NPR, which prefers to offer its listeners regular "NPR business updates" frequently during the day along with the daily program Marketplace, augmented by the weekly Sound Money. Matt Smith of the San Francisco Weekly attended a conference of investigative reporters in the spring of 2002 that he accurately described as "an assemblage of the journalism profession's most idealistic members." Yet even here, among journalists who come as close to the liberal-or even leftist-cliché as you will find anywhere, Smith could find only two panels that dealt with the lives of workers, though many of the rest were dedicated to covering business. Smith inquired of an economist sent by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics about whether he had been contacted by any reporters assigned specifically to covering workers' issues. The reply: "There was one intern with the Wall Street Journal."

Reporters' obsession with corporate wealth creation, or the appearance thereof, had the effect of turning them into CEO shills at the expense of even the most fundamental laws of good journalism. For instance, when, in May 2000, United Airlines and US Airways cut a deal to merge, their executives offered a deal to the Washington Post, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal: You can have the announcement story but only so long as you promise not to call any "critics" for comment. All accepted.

Perhaps the most visible development in increasing the momentum of CEO-friendly coverage during the past decade was the rise to prominence of CNBC. Begun in 1989 in a low-tech studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey, CNBC began as a combination consumer news and business station. But when GE/NBC purchased the bankrupt Financial News Network (FNN) in 1991, and combined it with CNBC, management decided to ax its consumer focus and stick to stocks. As author John Cassidy would observe, "Chief executives loved to go on CNBC. When they had good news to impart, they could deliver it directly; when they had bad news, they could sugarcoat it for investors. Either way, they were assured of a respectful hearing. To the town-car passengers, who were mostly analysts and fund managers, CNBC was a platform from which they could 'talk their book'-pump the stocks that their firms owned." CNBC reporters were more than content to let them do so.

p176
Florida

Any sensible analysis of the battle over Florida [2000 election] must take into consideration two essential points: First, the actual vote was a statistical tie, well within the built-in margin of error of any system of immediate measurement. Second, the Republicans were always going to find a way to win, by whatever means turned out to be necessary.

The people who sell the voting systems that tallied 3.45 million votes in the contested state tout their counting machines as 99.99 percent accurate under ideal conditions. But in Florida, that tiny error rate alone could have misread 345 votes which, for long periods, was more than George Bush's allegedly winning margin. A 330-vote margin out of six million Florida votes cast is approximately equivalent to a one-vote margin in a city with 40,000 people and 18,000 voters. And in Florida, 2000, we were a long way from any sane person's idea of "ideal conditions."

All of this is true even though more Floridians, unquestionably, went to the polls intending to vote for Al Gore on Election Day than for George Bush. Almost certainly, more legal votes were actually cast for Al Gore than for Bush, although many of these were successfully disqualified by Republican officials. Before Election Day, Secretary of State Katherine Harris had hired a GOP-connected database company to purge the state's voter rolls of thousands of mostly minority citizens, many of whom the company falsely categorized as felons. In Seminole and Martin Counties, Republican election officials allowed Republican operatives to doctor absentee-ballot applications, while Democrats were not granted the same right. According to journalist John Lantiqua, "In all, some 200,000 Floridians were either not permitted to vote in the November 7 election on questionable or possibly illegal grounds, or saw their ballots discarded and not counted. A large and disproportionate number were black." At the end of August 2002, the state of Florida agreed to settle a voter discrimination lawsuit with the NAACP, instead of facing the prospect of attempting to prove that Bush had been allowed to get his vote totals fair and square. Miami-Dade, Broward, Leon, Volusia, and Duval counties settled earlier rather than face trial.

The Gore team was outmatched by virtually every measure. According to records the Bush campaign reluctantly and belatedly submitted to the Internal Revenue Service, the Republicans poured $13.8 million into winning the battle, which was about four times what the Gore campaign spent. (And this was only its "official" count.) Meanwhile, in Washington, Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee helped the Bush campaign obtain private contact information for military voters, violating the tradition of impartiality of the military and directly involving Congress in a partisan hunt for pro-Bush votes. Neither side could honestly be said to demand an honest count; rather both merely tried to find a method that would put their man on top. In this regard, the Gore campaign demonstrated both its amorality and incompetence, while the Bush campaign demonstrated only the former.

The ultimate outcome in Florida was never in doubt. The Republicans were always going to win it, somehow. They wanted it worse and they had the means to make their desires into reality. Republicans controlled the Florida governorship; the office of secretary of state, which ruled in its favor on every single occasion offered; the legislature, which was preparing to hand the election to Bush no matter how the vote count eventually turned out. The party also controlled the U.S. Congress, should it come to that, and, as we all now know, the U.S. Supreme Court. The only important significant institution the Republicans could not control, the Florida Supreme Court, was proven irrelevant by the ones they did. Al Gore would have had to be an extraordinarily audacious popular leader and a tactically brilliant politician to challenge this near iron-lock on the process. Suffice to say, Al Gore was neither. Even so, an alert, fair-minded media could at least have helped even up the sides in Florida, forcing the winners (and losers) to do in daylight what they accomplished in the cover of darkness. They could have defended the institutions of democracy against those who sought to undermine them in pursuit of victory. They could have, in other words, demanded at least a modicum of accountability on behalf of the nation whose rulers were being chosen.

p178
When the Bush family consigliore, James Baker, arrived in Florida at the behest of Dick Cheney three days after the election, the alleged difference between the two candidates had fallen from 1,784 votes to just 327.'7 Any number of mishaps-including the elderly Jewish vote in Palm Beach going to Buchanan-were necessary for Bush even to make it close. The exit polls for Florida had essentially been correct Gore had clearly won the intent of Florida voters, and if that state's election laws had been disinterestedly enforced, he would have won its electoral votes as well.

The Republican strategy never wavered: "No manual recounts" period. The election was over and Bush won. End of Discussion. Let the transition commence." The Gore team's message, as usual, changed every day. "Let's count this county, no that county, no this one; manual recount here, but not there." Gore never went for the obvious opportunity to demand a complete manual recount of all Florida's votes. He did say he would agree to one in the impossibly unlikely event that the Bush team requested it, but, like Bush, he preferred those recounts he expected to win. In doing so, he blew the opportunity to capture the nation's imagination with the only solution that might have won him the day.

p182
Long before the Supreme Court ended the election, the media were already positing a Bush presidency. On December 3 and December 10, the panelists on ABC's This Week made at least twenty-seven references to Bush's future presidency. Tim Russert did so nineteen times, going so far as to refer to Dick Cheney as "vice president." Russert asked Cheney if he thought Gore was being a "sore loser" on December 3, nine days before the court's decision. That same week, on ABC, Sam Donaldson tried to elicit a concession from Joe Lieberman. Cokie Roberts tried to get one from campaign representative George Mitchell. As Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Paul Waldman demonstrate in their study, The-Press Effect, "In the five Sunday shows aired by the three networks, the word 'concede' appeared in twenty-three questions." In twenty of them, the hypothetical conceder was Al Gore. In the others it was, well, no one.

One of the most frequently made arguments for a Gore concession-made first by Bush and Baker but repeated by partisans in the media-drew an analogy to the election of 1960. Richard Reeves, biographer of both Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times that told the story of Nixon's alleged unwillingness to contest the close election for the good of the nation. William Bennett, William Safire, R. W. Apple, and many others made the same suggestion using the same analogy. In a display of shocking naiveté for a battle-hardened veteran, Apple even quoted Nixon's own memoirs on the topic, as if the famed unindicted co-conspirator could be trusted to tell the truth about his own actions, much less his motives.' But as Salon's Gerald Posner and Slate's David Greenberg instructed the pundits, Nixon and his Republican allies actually mounted a massive vote challenge. Posner explained:

Not only did Republican senators like Thurston Morton ask for recounts in 11 states just three days after the election, but Nixon aides Bob Finch and Len Hall personally did field checks of votes in almost a dozen states. The Republicans obtained recounts, involved U.S. Attorneys and the FBI, and even impaneled grand juries in their quest to get a different election result. A slew of lawsuits were filed by Republicans, and unsuccessful appeals to state election commissions routinely followed. However, all their efforts failed to uncover any significant wrongdoing.

Another oddity of the media coverage of Florida was its constant warnings about the consequences of testing the patience of a nation alleged to be on the verge of a national nervous breakdown. The Baker/Bush team worked hard to create this crisis atmosphere in the hopes of increasing the pressure on Gore to relent for the good of the country, the markets, and the maintenance of world peace. Constitutional rule in America was frequently claimed to be in peril by one or another pundit or reporter, the longer the count continued. Newsweek ran a cover with a rip in the Constitution and the word "CHAOS" emblazoned on it. U.S. Newsweek World Report ran the same cover without the rip. Tim Russert warned, "We could have chaos and a constitutional crisis." Tom Brokaw followed up on Today warning, "If the Florida recount drags on, the national markets are at risk here. National security is involved."

"Another week and no more," R. W. Apple warned Gore on the front page of the New York Times just two days after the election (and more than a month before the case was finally settled). "By next weekend," he announced, "a group of scholars and senior politicians interviewed this weekend agreed the presidential race of 2000 must be resolved, without recourse to the courts." ABC's This Week warned of "turmoil" as CBS's Face the Nation feared a political process "spinning out of control." Always, the danger was blamed on Gore, who was said by the hosts of both This Week and NBC's Meet the Press to be willing to do anything to win.

David Broder compared the period unfavorably with that immediately after the assassination of President Kennedy. The pundits seemed to believe, as ABC's Cokie Roberts explained, that we were living though "the most partisan time that we have seen in our lives." She professed to be privy to polls "showing that the longer it goes on, the less people have confidence in the accuracy of the count." In fact, every single poll taken at the moment of Roberts's November 19 comments demonstrated that strong majorities of voters preferred an "accurate" count to a "quick" one. The public also favored, by these same outsized majorities, manual recounts of disputed counties. As late as November 19, just 10 percent agreed with the assessment that the United States faced a "Constitutional crisis." Even on the day after the Supreme Court decision that ended the recount, the Washington Post continued to report, "The latest polls taken before the decision . . . showed continued strong public support for counting Florida ballots as fully and accurately as possible."

In one of the most significant events of the recount, the media joined in a Republican effort to force the Gore campaign to count the ballots of military voters who by law should have been excluded.

p190
... buried beneath the misleading headlines was the inescapable fact that Al Gore was the genuine choice of a plurality of Florida's voters as well as of America's. As the AP report put it, "In the review of all the state's disputed ballots, Gore edged ahead under all six scenarios for counting all undervotes and overvotes statewide." In other words, he got more votes in Florida than George Bush by almost every conceivable counting standard. Gore won under a strict-counting scenario and he won under a loose-counting scenario. He won if you counted "hanging chads," and he won if you counted "dimpled chads." He won if you counted a dimpled chad only in the presence of another dimpled chad on the same ballot-the so-called "Palm Beach" standard. He even won if you counted only a fully punched chad. He won if you counted partially filled ovals on an optical scan and he won if you counted only fully filled ovals. He won if you fairly counted the absentee ballots. No matter how you counted it, if everyone who legally voted in Florida had had a chance to see their vote counted, Al Gore was our president.

But by the time of the release of the report, the mainstream media had grown so protective of President Bush's legitimacy that many were willing to tar as crazy anyone who took the trouble to read the report carefully. To this reader anyway, they put one in mind of a husband who is doing everything he can to try to get his wife not only to forgive, but also to forget a past infidelity. The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz reported, "The conspiracy theorists have been out in force, convinced that the media were covering up the Florida election results to protect President Bush.... That gets put to rest today." Kurtz scoffed as well at the notion that anyone still cared about whether Bush had stolen the presidential election. "Now," he wrote, "the question is: How many people still care about the election deadlock that last fall felt like the story of the century-and now faintly echoes like some distant Civil War battle?" Following suit, the Associated Press even rewrote its own history. In September 2002, the news service carried a story from Florida that read: "Some unofficial ballot inspections paid for by consortiums of news agencies showed Bush winning by varying margins." But when the recounts were initially released in November 2001, the news service's editors had acknowledged, '^A full, statewide recount of all undervotes and overvotes could have erased Bush's 537-vote victory and put Gore ahead by a tiny margin ranging from 42 to 171 votes, depending on how valid votes are defined." Meanwhile CNN's Candy Crowley fell back on that old reliable, "Maybe the best thing of all is that messy feelings at the Florida ballot have only proved the strength of our democracy...."

In fact, had the Supreme Court not intervened for Bush, it seems quite likely that Gore would have won the count despite his own side's incompetence. Leon County Circuit Judge Terry Lewis informed an Orlando Sentinel reporter that he had never fully made up his mind, but he was considering the "overvote" standard that would likely have given the count to Gore. Newsweek's Michael Isikoff also discovered a contemporaneous document by Lewis demonstrating exactly this intent. Hence those newspapers that reported even the narrowest victory for Bush without a Supreme Court intervention may have been wrong. Once again, the so-called "liberal media" was spinning itself blind for the conservative Republican. But to point this out was to be termed a "conspiracy theorist" by the same "liberal media." Let's give the last word to the editors of the conservative London-based Economist, who, unlike their American counterparts, managed to read the results of recount with a clear eye, and hence, felt duty-bound to publish the following correction of its earlier coverage: "In the issues of December 16, 2000, to November 10, 2001, we may have given the impression that George W. Bush had been legally and duly elected president of the United States. We now understand that this may have been incorrect, and that the election result is still too close to call. The Economist apologizes for any inconvenience."

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