🚀 go-pugleaf

"Name withheld by request" <anon5c6c@nyx10.nyx.net> wrote in message
news:1072409899.59200@irys.nyx.net...
>
>Snip a bunch of wasted bytes<

Get over it dude.

"rm -rf Linux" <groups-abuse@google.com> wrote in message news:<bsgbk9$gd8@library1.airnews.net>...
> "Name withheld by request" <anon5c6c@nyx10.nyx.net> wrote in message
> news:1072409899.59200@irys.nyx.net...
> >
> >Snip a bunch of wasted bytes<
> 
> Get over it dude.

Yeah...who cares if elections don't count ?
http://www.blackboxvoting.com/

Both "candidates" sucked anyway.

 And now Iraq can have the same kinda freedom and democracy for the
low low price of only 166 billion !
(which is like $533.00 per person in the US).

Merry Xmas Iraq !

You're still losing sleep over an election that happened over 3 years ago? I
think you need to seek some professional help.

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.
>    _______________________________________________________________
>

Kevin <Um@nothanks.com> writes:

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

Or, if Gore's such a fucking winner how come he's not the pres now ???

<nobody@panix.com> wrote in message
news:bshliq$9ci$1@reader2.panix.com...
: Kevin <Um@nothanks.com> writes:
:
: > Funny how the only link to a "real" newpaper story does
not work.  Oh wait,
: > that must be part of the conspiracy.
Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiggghhhhtttttt.
:
: Or, if Gore's such a fucking winner how come he's not the
pres now ???

Whether or not Gore was illegally denied his election as
President, handling the recall through the US Supreme Court
was a tragic embarrassment in US history.
This country now has the opportunity to repair the four
years of damage delivered by President George W. Bush. An
administration is ultimately judged by its Cabinet and its
boss, the Preznit. I can't imagine that a President Gore
would have been so irresponsible on so many fronts, and it's
why I voted for him.
Whether it's going to be an election win for Clark or Dean,
are you a registered voter?
Don't be a lemming in the electorate next year, stay
informed.
rikkitikkitavi

"Kevin" <Um@nothanks.com> wrote in message
news:_IGdnZfB25dc0HGiRVn-hg@comcast.com...
> 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.

Kevin, find the book by Greg Palast, "The Best Election Money Can Buy".
It's all documented there, with names, affidavits, court and election board
records, memos, everything.  There are also records of the major news
outlets deciding to sit on the story.

It's all there.

<nobody@panix.com> wrote in message news:bshliq$9ci$1@reader2.panix.com...
> Kevin <Um@nothanks.com> writes:
>
> > Funny how the only link to a "real" newpaper story does not work.  Oh
wait,
> > that must be part of the conspiracy.  Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiggghhhhtttttt.
>
> Or, if Gore's such a fucking winner how come he's not the pres now ???

Because he wanted to be honest more than he wanted to be POTUS, and Dubya
wanted to be POTUS more than he wanted to be honest.

Gore is History --John Kerry is the future !

The grassroots is supporting a war hero like John Kerry...because:

http://jfkawards.freehomepage.com/grassroots.htm

Da Parrot-chick <just@sk.me> writes:

> > Or, if Gore's such a fucking winner how come he's not the pres now ???

> Because he wanted to be honest more than he wanted to be POTUS,

And exactly what does that mean?  If he was honest and he was the
winner then why isn't he running the country now?

> and Dubya
> wanted to be POTUS more than he wanted to be honest.

Obviously.

In article <c7ZGb.15453$aw2.8593980@newssrv26.news.prodigy.com>, ricktompkins wrote:

> Whether or not Gore was illegally denied his election as
> President, handling the recall through the US Supreme Court
> was a tragic embarrassment in US history.

Why? Because it stoped state courts from changing election law on the 
fly?  Heaven forbid that law be written and changed by legislative 
process. 

The funniest thing I ever read on the topic is the bush recount method
has gore winning and the gore method has bush winning. 

> This country now has the opportunity to repair the four
> years of damage delivered by President George W. Bush.

And 8 years of damage by clinton, 4 by bush sr, 8 by regan, 4 by 
carter.....

> An
> administration is ultimately judged by its Cabinet and its
> boss, the Preznit. I can't imagine that a President Gore
> would have been so irresponsible on so many fronts, and it's
> why I voted for him.

I can. Read what democrats were saying with regards to iraq in 1998.
Once the planes slammed into the buildings the US military is in Iraq
in 2003. 

> Whether it's going to be an election win for Clark or Dean,
> are you a registered voter?
> Don't be a lemming in the electorate next year, stay
> informed.

Properly informed will result in a person hating both major parties
and their canidates. 

I'm not running.  If it is really true then it would seem to me that some
democrat, libertarian, independent or even some disgruntled republican would
make use of this irrefutable evidence.

But I'm sure there is some long rambling conspiracy theory about that too.

"Da Parrot-chick" <just@sk.me> wrote in message
news:6TZGb.7356$lo3.3240@newsread2.news.pas.earthlink.net...
> "Kevin" <Um@nothanks.com> wrote in message
> news:_IGdnZfB25dc0HGiRVn-hg@comcast.com...
> > 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.
>
> Kevin, find the book by Greg Palast, "The Best Election Money Can Buy".
> It's all documented there, with names, affidavits, court and election
board
> records, memos, everything.  There are also records of the major news
> outlets deciding to sit on the story.
>
> It's all there.
>
>