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August 22, 2002
Is Al Barger a crazed conspiracy freak?
I may as well set the tone for this blog by beginning with some crazed left-wing conspiracy paranoia. A thought has been brewing in the back of my mind since the Y2K election debacle, but I haven't given it voice even in private conversations because it sounds nutty even to me. Nonetheless, I can't help but notice a set of data points that seem to call for a conclusion. Therefore, I'll just present the idea, and maybe y'all can tell me if there is evil afoot - or if I've just been down on the farm without a date for too long.
Thinking back, it sure looks as if people in the news divisions of the major broadcast networks purposely tried to throw the 2000 presidential election to Al Gore on election day by conscious force of fraud. There, I've said it.
I don't mean simply that their reporters, anchors and editors were liberal partisans during the election season, trying to make Dubya look bad and Gore look good. That much is obviously true. It is also perfectly legitimate function of a free press, even if I think they're fools.
No, it looks as though all through the election night, network election services were systematically looking for ways to make it look like Gore was winning, and Bush was losing, in order to encourage Democratic turnout and suppress Republicans. You could make yourself crazy punching and crunching numbers, but there was an unmistakable pattern of quickly calling states for Gore, within minutes - even ones that he won by small margins. Gore is getting called for winning Maine by 5 points within 10 minutes of polls closing. Bush, on the other hand, had to wait two hours and forty-one minutes to get called for winning Colorado by 9 points. There are a thousand and eleven ways of slicing and dicing the numbers, but there sure seems to have been a lot of leaning one way for it to be purely co-incidental.
The classic example of this, naturally, was in Florida where the networks were all calling the state for Gore even while the polls in the Republican-leaning panhandle were still open. There were claims that the polls were closed, and Gore had already won the state. Hey, might as well turn the car around and go home. No need wasting your time to vote for Bush: he's lost, and the polls are closed anyway.
I'm not saying that Dan Rather et al thought they were going to sway the election in Florida itself this way. They had no way to know that it was close enough that encouraging a couple of thousand voters to stay home in the panhandle might actually change the whole election outcome.
However, you don't have to go that far to accuse the media of skullduggery. Calling a couple of big states for Gore right away could be expected to help ongoing Democratic get out the vote efforts in the middle and western parts of the country. Hey, you've still got time to jump on the winning bandwagon! Western Republicans, why bother? Dubya has already been beat. The fact that this might actually sway the election in Florida itself was just gravy.
However, I find it difficult to believe that the networks were so stupid as to accidentally be calling Florida for Gore with polls still open. A local reporter following county returns in a small town might overlook some incoming last minute precinct reports. The networks, however, individually and collectively through the Voter News Service [VNS] spent tens of millions of dollars setting up reporting of hard incoming numbers, their own exit polls, and statistical analysis for all this. None of them even knew that the humpin' polls were still open? Hmmm.
In fairness, Florida was only being called for Gore about 10 minutes before polls were closed, and Dan Rather probably couldn't have known that their monkey business might actually change the outcome in Florida itself.
Nonetheless, there were a LOT of damned convenient errors and assumptions sliding helpfully Gores way -an awfully damned big lot of them for it to be accidental.
Don't get me wrong: I for one greatly enjoyed the extended election debacle. I didn't vote for Dubya [my guy Harry Browne "missed it by this much" as Maxwell Smart would say], so I certainly wasn't feeling cheated that way. The whole thing was a fascinating historical moment, and a great national civics lesson.
Still, after pimping for Al Gore through the whole season, the broadcast networks were pretty clearly trying to put their thumb on the scales on election night. I don't see how you can put much stock in the credibility of their reporting, ever.
Or am I missing something?
posted by Al at 8/22/2002 01:24:00 AM
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