🚀 go-pugleaf

The only way a conspiracy of three can succeed is if two of them are dead.

Ben Franklin.

Funny how the only link to a "real" newpaper story does not work.  Oh wait,
that must be part of the conspiracy.  Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiggghhhhtttttt.

"Name withheld by request" <anon5c6c@nyx10.nyx.net> wrote in message
news:1072409899.59200@irys.nyx.net...
> 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.
>    _______________________________________________________________
>