Posted on 09/18/2001 9:13:19 AM PDT by Sideshow Bob
One of the unnoticed after-effects of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington has been a delay in the planned release of the last — and largest — media recount of presidential election returns in Florida. Though it seems strange to contemplate today, as George W. Bush goes about his business as commander in chief, under different circumstances this week would likely have seen a high-profile attempt to renew the question of his legitimacy as president.
Before the events of September 11, editors at a consortium of blue-chip news organizations — the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Associated Press, CNN, and others — were in the final stages of work on their analysis of voting in Florida's 67 counties. "We were pretty much homing in [on publication]," says Dan Keating, who is running the project for the Washington Post. Now, the work is on hold, with the newspapers and networks hanging on to the story until a better time. "At this point, I think it's safe to say that this is not what the world is focused on," Keating says.
But whatever happens in coming weeks, the news organizations will have to fight the overwhelming sense that the story, in which they invested hundreds of thousands of dollars, is so...over. The country is facing an unprecedented crisis, Bush is president, buoyed by wartime approval ratings of 80-plus percent, and Al Gore has all but disappeared from the national scene. If anyone other than Democratic National Committee chief Terry McAuliffe and the editors of the New York Times are interested in the issue of hanging chads, they are not saying so.
It's not the outcome originally envisioned for the project, which was born in the heat of the election controversy and scheduled for completion several months ago. "There was some thought that it would only take ten weeks to wrap it up," says Julie Antelman, a spokeswoman for the National Opinion Research Center, which was hired by the consortium to do the actual vote counting. "But once it started it became obvious that that couldn't happen."
That's an understatement. Even though NORC assigned 153 "coders" — vote counters — to the project, the ballot analysis dragged on and on. There were problems getting access to the ballots. There were problems devising the best system for categorizing clues to voters' intent in ballots rejected during the original count. And as the "coding" went on, other media recounts, including the Miami Herald count that perhaps best reproduced actual conditions at the time of the election, showed that Bush would have won Florida under almost every conceivable scenario.
In addition, the fact that the big-media recount has taken so long — it is now more than ten months after Election Day — indicates that the mantra of "count every vote," whatever it might have meant to Gore's supporters, was not a practical possibility at the time of the election. Would Democrats prefer that the count still be going on today? The delays in the media recount are another indication that the vote counting that was done at the time, under the rules in place at the time, was the best indicator of who actually won.
All of that, together with the overwhelming events of the moment, make it likely that we won't see any front-page recount stories anytime soon. The news organizations are stuck with a very expensive story that has become a relic of an earlier time. The world has changed, and they are struggling with the realization that their meticulous inspection of hanging chads simply doesn't matter anymore.
What a bunch of Clymers!
Watching the terrorist attacks on the television news last Tuesday, then realizing that Al Gore was the president who had to deal with the situation.
My head is in the oven as I write this.
Enemies do not attack their allies.
Is that how impartial journalists treat news? Should I wait for the score of last night's baseball game until a time at which I might be more likely to notice it? Is news of bus accidents being held back until they might generate more interest? Of course not.
This is not news in any sense of the word. This is a free advertisement for the DNC from their press wing at the NY Times.
I wouldn't wipe my ass with that paper.
And while you're at it, please supply ANY publicly available poll supporting your contention.
Otherwise, Mr. Disruptor, GO AWAY.
This one line says it all, I believe.
Stay Safe
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