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THE MEDIA COVER-UP OF THE GORE VICTORY
PART FOUR: DEMOCRACY, GENERAL ELECTRIC
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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.
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 Welch’s 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 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.
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 Welch’s 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 Welch’s perspective, it was the pennies-per-hour workers in
General Electric’s 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 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”.
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 Welch’s 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 GE’s 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 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. And her managing editor, Tom Brokaw, did not
stand up for her right to journalistic independence from the corporate lord.
“I think Jack Welch’s the smartest boss I’ve 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 reporter’s 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
Welch’s 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.
America’s 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 company’s 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 Electric’s 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 protégé 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 America’s 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 GE’s profits, and would be
the nation’s 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, Karmazin’s 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. Karmazin’s
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
Karmazin’s 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 Stern’s 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 you’re 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. In fact, Bush
received better coverage than Gore from the entire mainstream media.
A study produced by the Project for Excellence in Journalism and the
Princeton Survey Research Associates examined 1,149 stories from 17 news
publications, programs and websites. The research revealed that there were
almost twice as many positive stories about Bush as there were about Gore. Even
more important than this blatant pro-Bush bias, the study found that the
coverage de-emphasized the philosophical differences between the candidates.
This was critical, because public opinion polls showed that the voters agreed
with Gore on the issues. By robbing Gore of his greatest advantage, the media
organizations were Bush’s greatest allies.
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 rapacious values of the networks mirrored those in the management of
print journalism and the banking community in general. The emphasis in private
meetings and phone conversations was that Bush would definitely call off the
federal watchdogs, which would allow the giant media conglomerates to grow as
large as they chose. The inconvenient pretense of federally licensed
broadcasters having to serve the public interest would finally be gone. Without
the intrusive feds butting in, the media giants would be free to “maximize
their potential”. Translated into English, this meant that the extraordinarily
valuable public ownership and control of the airwaves would essentially be
transferred to the media conglomerates for no cash down and monthly payments of
zero.
“A promise made is a promise kept.” This was George W. Bush’s frequent
pledge during the campaign, and when it came time to repay his media allies for
providing him with an uncritical convoy to the White House, he kept his promise.
Soon after assuming office, Bush appointed Colin Powell’s son to head the
Federal Communications Commission. Michael Powell could not be doing a better
job of aiding the media conglomerates at public expense if his name were Michael
Welch, Michael Karmazin, or Michael Eisner, Jr. One of Powell’s first moves
was to announce that the regulation prohibiting ownership of both television
stations and newspapers in the same city is going to be changed. “There is
something offensive to First Amendment values about that limitation,” he said.
There is something extraordinarily profitable to the media giants about
having that limitation lifted. Without the federal government insisting on
diversity in local markets, the vast multinational media corporations will be
able to monopolize the flow of information in cities across America. Their
potential for greater power and wealth is almost incalculable.
The deregulation of the American media, quietly promised by Bush and
currently being implemented by 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.
Welch’s successful behind-the-scenes campaign to influence media coverage
in a way that would get Bush into the White House has not been visible to the
public, with one exception. On election night, according to an eyewitness, Welch
was so angry that his own NBC News team would not call the race for Bush that he
personally went to the studio from which Tom Brokaw was anchoring the coverage.
Welch quietly watched the broadcast for a few minutes. Two people who were
present claim that, when Brokaw and Tim Russert did not take the hint that their
boss had come into the newsroom because he wanted something from them, he
explicitly announced that he wanted them to call the election for Bush.
They did. As a result, Bush entered the Florida recount phase with the
tremendous advantage of having already been declared the winner.
Congressman Henry Waxman questioned NBC News president Andrew Lack about the
incident. Waxman requested that Lack turn over to Congress the in-studio tapes
that were recorded that night, so that what Welch had allegedly done could be
verified. Lack, testifying under oath, agreed to do so.
As of this writing, he has refused to honor his commitment.
Aside from his one emotional faux pas on election night, Welch did a
masterful job of discreetly maneuvering behind the scenes. He convinced his
media conglomerate competitors that they all had a compelling interest in
discarding journalistic objectivity and helping Bush into the presidency. For
the public, the only telltale sign of the Welch effort was the end product: the
campaign coverage itself. From the mainstream media’s unprecedented
pre-primary build-up of George W. Bush to their declaration that he had won the
Florida recount before all of the votes had been reviewed, never before has a
presidential candidate received such active support from corporate journalism.
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”.
The only real harm that the media did to Bush during the whole campaign was
the revelation that he had been arrested for drunk driving in Maine. This story
was not broken by ABC or NBC or CBS or The
New York Times or the Washington Post
or any member of the media Consortium; it was made public by a relatively
obscure newspaper in Maine. In fact, the immediate reaction by all of the
aforementioned media giants was to falsely accuse Gore of leaking the story.
This flailing, ad hominem defense of their chosen candidate betrayed a certain
unhappiness on the part of the mainstream media that the news of Bush having
lied about his crime had become public knowledge.
The New York Times typified the
mainstream media’s coverage of the 2000 election. The editorial board of the Times
officially endorsed Al Gore for president, but it is the news section of the Times that is the common reference point, and that sets the tone for
the rest of the media’s day to day coverage. In the all-important news section
of The New York Times, George W. Bush
was being followed by softer than mush reporter Frank Bruni, whose coverage of
the candidate was so lovingly tender that Bush identified Bruni as “my
favorite reporter”.
The Times reporter who was assigned
to track Gore was Katherine Seelye, who sat on the campaign plane alongside her
pal Ceci Connolly of the Washington Post.
Together with the Times’ Richard
Berke, they were able to wreak a level of havoc on the Gore campaign that the
Bush team never even came close to approaching. Between them, these reporters
who were working for America’s two leading “liberal” newspapers managed to
falsely accuse Gore of taking credit for having invented the Internet, falsely
accuse Gore of claiming to have discovered the toxic waste at Love Canal, and
falsely accuse Gore of lying about being the inspiration for the male lead
character in “Love Story”.
They also falsely accused Gore of insisting that he had been serenaded to
sleep as a child to the tune of “Look For The Union Label”. The candidate
had actually been making a joke that was greeted with laughter by his union
audience.
After the crucial first presidential debate, the unholy triumvirate falsely
accused Gore of lying about an anecdote involving an old lady and her
prescription medicine (the lady confirmed Gore’s account), falsely accused
Gore of lying about an anecdote involving a Florida schoolgirl having to stand
in class because of equipment shortages (the girl confirmed Gore’s account),
and falsely accused Gore of lying about going to a fire in Texas with the head
of FEMA (it was actually the number two man at FEMA, but the mainstream media
did not allow for the possibility that Gore made inadvertent mistakes).
These phony accusations, not the Times
low impact endorsement, had a major effect on the campaign. Every time Gore
generated some momentum, the three deceitful journalists wrote of another
unsubstantiated allegation that claimed the Democratic nominee was crazed with a
compulsion to lie.
The New York Times Company and The Washington Post Company will both make
massive deregulation-related profits under Bush that they could never have
gained under Gore. Their reporters who lied about Gore were never punished, just
as Andrea Mitchell of NBC was never punished for repeatedly lying about White
House vandalism. In fact, all of these dishonest reporters have greatly
prospered.
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.
Some people have expressed skepticism that at least one intrepid corporate
reporter has not revealed the truth about what transpired in 2000. If the
charges of the mainstream media coordinating an effort at the highest levels to
skew their campaign coverage in favor of Bush were true, the skeptics contend,
then certainly one reputable mainstream reporter would have gone public with the
story.
Daniel Schorr has been enshrined in the
Hall of Fame of the Society of Professional Journalists.
In 1976, he was fired by CBS News when he sent a secret congressional
intelligence report to the Village Voice after CBS had refused to reveal the
story to the public. According to Schorr, he was punished by network
executives who had reached a deal with the White House to go easy on the
administration.
Schorr was fired for reporting the truth when it conflicted with the
interests of his employer.
Two Fox News reporters in Tampa, Jane Akre and Steve Wilson, assembled a
report revealing the covert use of a potentially harmful synthetic
milk-producing hormone that was being injected into dairy cows throughout much
of America. Fox executives killed the story out of concern that the dairy
industry would retaliate by refusing to purchase commercials on the network. The
reporters were so concerned about the safety of consumers that they defied their
bosses and released the report to the public. Fox immediately fired them.
Akre and Wilson were fired for reporting the truth when it conflicted with
the interests of their employer.
NBC’s own Arthur Kent was a star foreign correspondent after gaining fame
as the intrepid “Scud Stud” during the Gulf War. But when Kent was
reassigned to the NBC news magazine Dateline, he was appalled to see what
corporate journalism in America had become.
“A climate was being created in which corruption was imminent,” Kent told
the Ottawa Sun. “Once I had been convinced to join Dateline, I warned them in
writing that the editorial direction of the program was dangerous and that the
manipulation and re-editing of stories was going to cause trouble."
Kent offered to resign, but Jack Welch would not allow an uncooperative
journalist to get off the hook quite that easily. Kent was reassigned to cover
the war in Bosnia under ridiculously hazardous conditions. When he refused, NBC
publicly called him a coward, effectively ending his career with the network.
After an expensive battle, Kent won a court ordered apology and substantial
financial damages. He stated that the important aspect of the trial was the
revelation of how General Electric and NBC now operate.
“It was a GE-style, hardball approach: If you're not going to work for us,
you're not going to work for anybody,” he said. "They were seen by the
public to have lied.”
But the ethical journalist who called them on their lies had now gone off to
Europe in search of a country with freedom of the press. And every journalist
who remained at NBC learned from watching the Kent episode that insisting on
telling the truth in their reports was extremely hazardous to their vocational
health.
Kent was fired for demanding to report the truth when it conflicted with the
interests of his employer.
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.
The public pressure to release the results is making it likely that the
Consortium will feel the need to reveal something. The precedent in this
situation is the Miami Herald method of distortion, wherein the recount numbers
proved that Gore won but the headlines claimed that Bush won. The Consortium
could reprise that approach.
It could seek to obscure and confuse the situation by having various
Consortium members issue conflicting accounts of who won. This would explain why
the Wall Street Journal
is participating in a recount after editorializing that any further recounts
would be “un-American”.
A likely scenario would consist of a claim that, “Gore probably got a few
more votes than Bush, but it really was too close to call, and the Consortium
members can’t even agree among themselves who won, so it is impossible to ever
really know for certain.”
It is now improbable that the Consortium will claim that Bush got the most
votes because too many people who are intimately familiar with the process would
publicly refute such a blatant lie.
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 2000, Americans witnessed convoluted vote counting methods in Florida that
were designed to disqualify as many voters as it took in order to declare that
the winner was the candidate who received fewer votes statewide and nationally.
We saw a Supreme Court decision that was so surrealistically disgraceful that
none of the five members of the majority was willing to claim authorship of it
and, for the only time in the history of the Court, the majority declared that
its decision did not establish a precedent.
There was no conspiracy involved in the Supreme Court decision, either. There
was only the self-interest of five amoral judges taking advantage of an
opportunity to increase their power by disregarding the law and selecting a
president who would add to their conservative majority.
The Consortium now has ironclad proof that the wrong man is in the White
House, and the mainstream media preemptively insist that it doesn’t matter.
NBC News analyst and Welch protégé Tim Russert recently said, “The issue of
legitimacy has been resolved.” He does not want the results of the ballot
study to be released.
Neither does Mr. Berke of The New York
Times, a member of the Consortium. Berke recently wrote that releasing the
results would be divisive, and that it really doesn’t matter who won. It is
unusual, to say the least, for a reporter to write that a project on which his
newspaper has just spent hundreds of thousands of dollars doesn’t matter. It
is even more unusual for the paper to then publish such heresy.
Of course, Berke knows that reporting the truth would not be divisive if the
ballot study had proven that the man who really won the election is currently
president. Berke has at least one contact inside the ballot study who has also
spoken with MakeThemAccountable. We can therefore report with certainty that Mr.
Berke wrote his rationalization for withholding the truth only after he was
informed by an inside source that the study definitively proves that Al Gore won
Florida.
Berke also claimed that the reason the Consortium members have delayed
releasing the results of the ballot study is that the war on terrorism has
monopolized the attention of all of their political reporters. This is an
uncommonly transparent lie, even for the congenitally dishonest Mr. Berke. He is
a political reporter who works for a Consortium paper, and his own attention has
not been monopolized by the war on terrorism. He has spent his time since
September 11 continuing his two-year disinformation campaign to sell George W.
Bush to the American people. Berke wrote on October 20 that Gore supporters are
privately expressing to him that they are “relieved” that the Supreme Court
selected Bush to be president.
Brave reporters like Walter Cronkite are now distant memories of the
pre-Welch era of journalism; the modern guardians of the truth are opportunistic
prostitutes like Tim Russert and abject liars like Richard Berke. It is
difficult to find any journalists in the corporate media who believe that the
true outcome of the balloting in Florida matters. The people whose lives are
supposedly dedicated to reporting the truth are adamant that, in the case of
which candidate actually won the presidency, reporting the truth just doesn’t
matter.
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. They might decide that
there is nothing sacred about national boundaries anywhere. Liberals have been
called paranoid for warning that the same corporations that tampered with
governments in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia would eventually
decide that the will of the voters in the United States is not sacrosanct,
either.
In 2000, the paranoid warnings became reality. General Electric and
like-minded interests were able to defy the will of the majority of the American
people and drag into the White House the least qualified major party
presidential candidate in the history of the country. Since gaining office,
George W. Bush has been slavishly devoted to enacting the corporate agenda. Even
during a time of war, he has been focused on relentlessly advocating the
interests of those who made him president.
Six days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Bush
FCC appointee Michael Powell announced a ruling that affected corporations
having licenses to operate 130 UHF TV stations broadcasting on certain
frequencies. The FCC gave the media companies approval to sell those
taxpayer-owned licenses and keep the tens of billions of dollars that will be
generated by the sales.
It was never a conspiracy. It was always greed.
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.
In the absence of overwhelming public pressure by citizens who value
democracy more than multinational corporations value money, the members of the
Consortium will honor the paradigm of Jack Welch: They will disregard all
principles of journalism, in order to do what is best for the corporate bottom
line.
Epilogue: Jack Welch retired as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of
General Electric on September 7, 2001. According to Business Week, “Welch's
leadership style has become so embedded in the organization that even his
retirement is unlikely to erode his impact”. He is currently employed
as a management consultant to major corporations that he refuses to identify.
NEXT: Answering The Skeptics
