Posted on 12/18/2003 12:13:45 PM PST by Publius
The following is a work of fiction, although I suspect there is far too much fact in it for comfort.
It is the day before the presidential election of 2000. The place is a conference room in an office building in New York City. Present are representatives of the Democratic National Committee and the various network representatives with the old Voters News Service. To protect the guilty, identities will be stated by organization, not name.
DNC: Good morning, gentlemen. You’re probably wondering why we asked that this meeting be held in a building not connected with your parent organizations. A neutral site, as it were.
CNN: Not me. You’ve got something up your sleeve.
DNC: Gentlemen, we’re in a difficult situation. Our polling indicates that this election will be the closest since 1960. And that means we’re going to have to duplicate our success of that year.
CBS: Sam Giancana’s dead. That dog won’t hunt.
DNC: Our means are different, even if our end is the same. We have too much riding on this election. The fate of the country. The fate of liberalism. The fate of everything you and your corporate ancestors have worked for since the end of World War II. This one is going to be too close, and we’re going to have to guide the voters to the correct decision. (pauses) We believe the key is Florida.
NBC: The old chalkboard doesn’t lie.
DNC: No, sir, it doesn’t. Florida is an unusual state. It’s split between two time zones with a single time for the closing of the polls. That means that the polls in Florida close twice, once for each time zone. The Eastern time zone is dominated by Democratic votes in South Florida, and the Central time zone by Republican votes in redneck country. Suppose, just for the sake of argument, the networks call Florida for Gore when the polls in the Eastern time zone shut down.
CNN: You just skated off the edge. That’s illegal!
DNC: It’s a violation of administrative law, not criminal law. The fine is chump change.
NBC: And then the FCC investigates and takes away the licenses of our TV stations.
DNC: I can guarantee you the Gore Administration will make sure the investigation exonerates your organizations of any and all illegalities.
NBC: You know, if Clinton had packed it in before impeachment, we wouldn’t be here. You’d be sitting on a Gore landslide tomorrow.
DNC: When we suggested resignation to the president, he threw us out of his office. You were all quite helpful in digging up the dirt on Thurmond and Lott—
CBS: And Byrd and Hyde and Burton and Livingston—
ABC: And Jefferson—
(general laughter)
DNC: Your country and cause need you today, gentlemen.
ABC: My country doesn’t have your problems with Radical Right buffoons.
DNC: Present company excepted. (pauses) We believe that an early call of Florida will suppress enough Republican turnout to hand the state to Gore. (pauses for effect) And as many as three to eleven other states.
CBS: This isn’t a pile of Texas-size BS you’re shoveling, son?
DNC: No, sir, it’s real. We have an opportunity to change history and keep this country on the right track. We can prevent a catastrophe.
NBC: I want to hear the legal technicalities you plan to skirt. We’re talking election fraud here. Jack Welch would can the entire news division if he knew what we were doing.
DNC: Technically, it’s not fraud. The Constitution states that federal elections are to be held on the same day. There is no legal possibility of a revote. Individual votes can be challenged as fraudulent, but not an entire election. Let’s take a worst case scenario.
CBS: The Republicans scream collusion.
DNC: You just say it was a bureaucratic snafu. An innocent little mistake. Somebody forgot that Florida has two closing times. (pauses) There’s no possibility of a court declaring a revote. There will be challenges to individual ballots only and in a few jurisdictions, but not enough to make a difference. The Republicans will scream, but even if they could prove we threw the election – which they can’t – they won’t have any legal recourse. They’ll fold like Nixon. And then Gore takes the heat off after the election. The worst that can happen is a fine from the FCC, and that’s unlikely because we can control that.
CBS: But what about our journalistic integrity?
(general laughter)
CBS: Aw c’mon, guys!
The rest of this story is known to everyone.
But the story doesn’t really end there.
On the morning of the 2002 congressional elections, every single VNS satellite uplink failed. A few months later, VNS was shut down and liquidated. I can imagine an emergency meeting held on election day afternoon in the same conference room.
CBS: They know! They found out we were going to do it again!
DNC: Let’s not panic, everyone. I got up here on the train as fast as I could. It could just be sunspots.
CNN: Sunspots?! Every single f***ing uplink?!
NBC: No. Somebody ordered the NSA to shut us down. Bush.
ABC: No. Bush would need deniability. I bet Cheney made the call.
DNC: Gentlemen, this is only about a congressional election. The stakes are high, but not like two years ago. There’s nothing to worry about. What’s our backup plan?
NBC: Listen, pal, there’s this thing called the Patriot Act. One phone call from DC and any one of us could disappear. Suppose Ashcroft construes election fraud as treason! I don’t know about you, but when they pour that white-hot lead up my ass, I’ll give them name, rank, serial number – and the identity of every girl, boy and sheep you guys have banged over the past twenty years!
DNC: You’re being paranoid.
CNN: How do we know they haven’t got this room wired?
CBS: How do we know one of us isn’t wired?
(long silence)
ABC: Grab him!
(sounds of scuffle)
CBS: Rip his pants off! Find the wire!
DNC: Ouch, you’re hurting me!!
60% of the electorate has little to no confidence in the network news.
Both Rathergate and the Kopple piece have been aired and Dubya is up in the polls.
They may have done what Publius suggests (fantastic script!!!). It seems plausible to me and so does the NSA involvement in the 2002 uplink failures. But the people have awakened enough that they aren't being conned. Most of the kids I know tell me they learned early in life to pretend they accepted the inculcations in school and the media and continued with their own private thoughts. One young man told me:"You just learn who is telling you the truth." All of them grin like mad when I ask them how they beat the liberal indoctrination.
Maybe the complicit establishment won't bust the nets, but the people already have.
Now that they have NEP instead of VNS, they may try it again. But there's no doubt in my mind that the NSA would shut them down again the minute they made a suspect call.
Wait, wait, wait. I think I'm behind. Why would the National Security Admin (right?) have shut down VNS? Even though I like the idea.
The only thing other than sunspots that could shut down every VNS satellite uplink is the National Security Agency (NSA). It would only do so under orders of the president, but because presidents like to have deniability in situations like this, my suspicion is that Cheney made the call. Thus we avoided a repeat of 2000 in 2002.
What gives? I haven't the faintest what you are talking about either! Sometimes you just have to keep pluggin. I know of no-one that should ridicule as long as you have a valid point. Maybe you just haven't reached the right individuals.
Day-before-the-election ping.
DNC: Florida is an unusual state. It’s split between two time zones with a single time for the closing of the polls. That means that the polls in Florida close twice, once for each time zone. The Eastern time zone is dominated by Democratic votes in South Florida, and the Central time zone by Republican votes in redneck country. Suppose, just for the sake of argument, the networks call Florida for Gore when the polls in the Eastern time zone shut down.CNN: You just skated off the edge. That’s illegal!
DNC: It’s a violation of administrative law, not criminal law. The fine is chump change.
The MSM has already been trying to "project" the results over early polling yet the polls have not CLOSED. They are already trying to influence the outcome in some states.
And so the collusion continues, but less blatant this time.
I am not certain that Fox followed the other networks into calling for Gore in the 9PM time frame or not - but I believe that it did. And that all of them rescinded that call an hour or two (maybe three) later.
It was amazing how little the networks said Wednesday morning about their own faux pas and how very much they made of the fact that the FNC analyst who made the first call of FL for Bush was actually a cousin of Bush.
But FL was just the extreme example of the general tendency of the night - which was that all the networks and CNN delayed calling just about every state for Bush far more than they delayed calling a state for Gore, the ultimate margin of victory being similar. There was only one state which was a clear exception to that general trend.
In the aftermath of that fiasco I started the following thread, which I have used since then as my repository of research on the media and the First Amendment:
Why Broadcast Journalism is
Unnecessary and Illegitimate
Now I'm going to see if they try a play from the same old playbook.
BTTT!!!!!!!!
Ping.
I referenced Why Broadcast Journalism is Unnecessary and Illegitimate in that thread. That was the best I could then do - but I think that this thread is beginning to approach the definitive answer to the characteristics of journalism and why not only broadcasting but all of journalism is vulnerable to a lawsuit. It turns out that the Associated Press was found to be in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act back in 1945 . . . and that an amazing amount of the objectionable qualities we observe in journalism can be laid at the door of the AP.
Ping.
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