Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (15 page)

CNN’s Judy Woodruff proclaimed: “[I]t’s a conflict of interest to have someone related to the candidate in that position.”
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Salon’s
Eric Boehlert discerned a “vast right-wing conspiracy” in Fox’s hiring of “a partisan Bush cousin,” claiming that “his flawed call of Florida” had created “the false impression that Bush had won the election.”
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More than six months after the election, CNN’s Bill Press was still berating Ellis for the appalling act of making an accurate election-night projection.
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Howard Kurtz, ombudsman apologist for liberal media bias, ran a full expose in the
Washington Post
on the Bush cousin fracas.
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In an article headlined “Bush Cousin Made Florida Vote Call for Fox News,” Kurtz said “media circles were buzzing” over the “question of why Fox had installed a Bush relative in such a sensitive post.” He uttered the full mantra, saying the projection “turned out to be wrong” (it didn’t) and “created the impression that Bush had ‘won’ the White House.” (He did win, and, in any event, presidential elections aren’t decided by “impressions.”) At least Kurtz limited his insanity to claiming Fox News’s 2:16 a.m. projection was merely “crucial.” This was in contradistinction to the incorrect call for Gore while the polls were still open and that actually affected the voting. That was sharp reporting. Only the correct call for Bush cried out for its own Oliver Stone movie.

Kurtz quoted Tom Rosenstiel, identified as “Vice Chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists,” hyperventilating that the correct call for Bush “was “wrong, unnecessary, misguided, foolish, unthinkable”! (An earlier concern of the Concerned Journalist was that Roger Ailes had forced Bill Clinton to make “his speeches more malicious than they would otherwise be”—citing Paul Begala as his source.
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) Rosenstiel also feverishly claimed that Ellis was “actually deciding” the election result. Soon Rosenstiel will be attacking weathermen who predict rain, thus “actually deciding” the weather. Indeed, Ellis would have had more capacity to effect the vote had he been a weatherman. Then at least he could have predicted rain and suppressed the Democratic vote.

And Ellis’s influence would have been astronomically greater if he were a television personality like Matt Lauer propagandizing daily on NBC’s
Today
show, as when he gushed to Al Gore about his phony convention kiss—”After watching that kiss I know how you survived thirty years, Mr. Vice President. Way to go!” Or if he had been ABC’s Terry Moran, who asked Gore if, given his vast experience and knowledge, he was “frustrated” during the presidential debates to “look across the stage” and see George Bush.
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Leading a team that projects election results leaves somewhat less room for forthright political propaganda.

The Minneapolis
Star Tribune
recycled the psychological advantage theory, accusing Fox News of instigating “a chain of events that led to the preliminary impression that Bush was the winner.”
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Representative Henry Waxman (D-Cal.) denounced the call for creating a “presumption that George Bush won the election.”
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Even the left’s pop culture scrub team was promoting the ludicrous psychological boost theory. Movie reviewer Roger Ebert took a break from scribbling tributes to
Booty Call
to denounce the Republicans for having “established] effective ‘memes’; in the minds of the public and the pundits” persuading them that Bush had won. A “meme,” he explained, “is like a gene, except that instead of advancing through organisms, it moves through minds.”
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Of course, one other factor that simply cannot be discounted as a factor in helping create the “impression” that Bush won is that he won. He won the original count in Florida. He won three recounts, including two exclusively in Democrat bastions (in violation of the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause, according to seven Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court). He won the count of the absentee ballots. He won the watchdog media’s interminable recounts conducted for one full year after the election. He even won on the
New York Times’s
unique vote-counting method that involved throwing out military ballots.
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So that’s something to consider.

Marvin Kalb of Harvard’s Shorenstein press center criticized Fox News for creating the “wrong impression” by hiring Ellis. While this quote appeared in a Howard Kurtz
Washington Post
column (high degree of skepticism necessary), Kalb’s remarks were consistent with the tenor of the general media caterwauling. Having a cousin of Bush’s in the news business was wrong, Kalb said, because Ellis would “seem to be the one making the call.”

Without performing any in-depth investigation—such as asking Paul Begala—I believe one possible explanation for why Ellis might “seem” to be the one making the call is that everyone in the press kept saying Ellis was the one making the call. /

Whenever liberals’ lies are about to be exposed, they blame the target of their lies for having created the circumstances that allowed liberals to lie about them. This is often known as creating “an appearance of impropriety.” It was Fox News’s fault for hiring Ellis, because by hiring Ellis, Fox opened the door for liberals to falsely accuse Ellis of throwing the election to Bush.

Ellis was also incongruously blamed for embroidering his role. Amid a litany of his treacheries detailed in the
Washington Post,
Fox News staffers were described as “angry at what they see as Ellis exaggerating his role.”
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This was in an article titled “Bush Cousin Made Florida Vote Call for Fox News.” Wait—so did Ellis have a big role in making the Florida call or was it a small role that he was exaggerating?

There are advantages to controlling the media: Eventually the head of Fox News was required to defend its employment of Ellis in a congressional hearing.

Fox News’s 2:16 a.m. call for Bush violated no ethical standards nor—as we now know—was it inaccurate. The most that could be said about it is that it gave Bush some amorphous “psychological” advantage.

Any statement about an election after the polls are closed can have absolutely no effect on the vote total. Nor did liberals ever claim otherwise. Rather they blathered incoherently about the supernatural “psychological” influence of mystical “memes.” By contrast, calling Florida for Gore while Florida polls were still open had a substantive effect on the outcome. Not only did the networks erroneously announce that Gore had won Florida, but they repeatedly declared that the polls were closed in Florida when they were not. CBS News alone announced eighteen times that the polls were closed in Florida during the last hour the polls were still open.
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Three separate studies have confirmed the blinding obvious fact that by calling Florida for Gore beginning at 7:49 p.m. the networks suppressed thousands of votes in the heavily Republican Florida Panhandle and cost Bush votes.

Looking at Republican and Democratic voting patterns across Florida in every presidential election since 1976, economist John Lott compared the vote in the Panhandle to that in the rest of the state in the 2000 election. He found “an unusual drop-off in Republican voting rates in Florida’s 10 western Panhandle counties in 2000.”
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The drop-off was evident relative to both the prior presidential elections and the rest of the state. Lott estimated that the erroneous projection for Gore cost Bush between 10,000 to 37,000 votes.
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A poll of Panhandle voters conducted by John McLaughlin & Associates also concluded that the early projection for Gore cost Bush about ten thousand votes. Evidently, many Republican Panhandle voters went home after hearing confident assertions that their votes were irrelevant, anyway— or even that the polls had closed. (As Dan Rather had assured CBS viewers on election night: “If we say somebody’s carried the state, you can take that to the bank.”)

Even a study commissioned by Democrat strategist Bob Beckel found that Bush suffered a net loss of eight thousand votes in the western Panhandle because of the premature, inaccurate call for Gore.
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(Beckel later made news when he tried to persuade Bush electors to switch their votes to Gore.)

The networks were dramatically, viciously wrong about their phony projection for Gore, and have never apologized for dragging the nation through an election crisis of their own creation. To the contrary, the big

question for the media was whether a cousin of George Bush’s tricked Fox News into (correctly) calling Florida for Bush fifty-five seconds before the next stations to call it, long after the polls had closed, long after most people had gone to bed, and thereby gave Bush a “psychological” advantage, helping “create the suggestion” that he had won.

Like most liberal propaganda, the accusation against John Ellis started with a wee little wisp of truth and immediately dovetailed into an ocean of lies.

First, and most painfully obvious, network decision teams don’t sit around drinking pina coladas all day and shout out winners when the mood strikes them. Calling elections is a number-crunching process involving scores of analysts both inside and outside the network. One lone analyst could not single-handedly decide any election-night projections. There are literally hundreds, maybe thousands of people involved in the process of gathering and analyzing election-night data.

The now-notorious Voter News Service, used by all the networks, assembles sample precinct data and raw vote totals from every state and county in America. That data gets plugged into computer analyses continuously throughout election day to produce statistical estimates of probable outcomes all over the country. Four people on the Fox News decision team were methodically analyzing the VNS data and—this being the media—the other three were Democrats.

Fox News had been the third network to project a Gore win in Florida earlier in the evening. Was that erroneous call a clever ruse to throw everyone off the scent before Ellis sneakily threw the election for Bush at 2:16 a.m. ?

In a major report on how the networks had blundered into making a correct call for Bush at two in the morning, the
Los Angeles Times
suggestively reported that the networks were “following the lead of Fox News—where Bush’s first cousin John Ellis worked as an analyst.” The theory that John Ellis was single-handedly responsible for Fox News’s projection is fatuous enough. The idea that he was responsible for the projections of all the other networks requires something of a conspiratorial mind-set. But as explained by Concerned Propagandist Rosenstiel, after Fox called the election for Bush, the other networks were “pressured by Fox’s decision” to call the state for Bush, too. That “collective error helped create the suggestion of a race won by Bush.”
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It was a “suggestion” made all the more insidious by virtue of being true.

It is, after all, an incontrovertible fact that Fox News was right: Bush won. At no point from the moment Fox News called Florida for Bush—even after endless media-sponsored recounts continuing one year into the Bush administration—did Gore ever surpass Bush’s lead.

But moreover, not only would all the other “decision desk” analysts at Fox have had to be part of the malevolent Ellis conspiracy, but VNS would have had to be in on it, too. When Fox News called Florida for Bush, the VNS numbers indicated—accurately, as it turns out—that it would be impossible for Gore to overcome Bush’s lead. By 1:30 a.m., with 95 percent of Florida’s precincts counted, VNS had Bush winning with about a sixty thousand-vote lead.
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At 2:00 a.m. Gore would have needed to win 64 percent of the remaining 5 percent of votes to surpass Bush’s lead.

Under normal circumstances, the decision desks at every network would have called Florida for Bush as soon as Gore’s incoming votes began to fall below 64 percent. As the few remaining precincts were reported, Gore was only getting 60 percent and his numbers continued to shrink. Florida should have been called for Bush.
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But, oddly enough, though all the networks were looking at the same VNS data, something was preventing them from calling the state for Bush. It was not until Fox News broke the logjam and projected Florida for Bush that the other networks followed—and with some alacrity.

If Gore had been the one in the lead with the same numbers, Fox News would not have had to be the first to give Florida to Bush. We know that because when Gore had a less impressive lead earlier in the evening, all the networks did give Florida to Gore.

The left’s conspiracy theory holds that the rapid calls for Bush by the other networks were all part of John Ellis’s devilish plan. Somehow Fox’s projection forced—forced—the other networks to call Florida for Bush. ABC, NBC, and CBS announced that Bush had won only because Fox had, and pay no attention to the VNS numbers showing Bush had won. But the fly in the Xanax is, there was evidently no such competitive pressure earlier in the evening with the (incorrect) projection for Gore. Florida was a do-or-die state. If Bush lost in Florida, short of divine intervention, he would have lost the election. NBC was the first to incorrectly project a Gore win in Florida at 7:49. CNN waited six minutes to incorrectly project Gore—an eternity in election projections. ABC waited an interminable thirteen minutes to make the incorrect call.
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So it is telling that—unlike the early evening projection for Gore— when Fox called Florida for Bush at 2:16:46 a.m., it opened the floodgates.