Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (16 page)

Within three minutes and forty-one seconds, every other network had made the same call. NBC and CBS had the Bush victory up within sixty seconds of Fox News.
²⁴
Executives from the other networks uniformly denied being influenced by Fox’s projection.
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They may have other reasons for saying so, but it has to be admitted, a case can be made that it was not Fox, but the fact that Bush had won Florida, that persuaded the networks to project that Bush had won Florida. The networks had ponied up millions of dollars for the VNS service. It’s not insane to think they were using it.

The only serious question was how all the networks had managed to project Gore the winner of Florida earlier in the evening, incorrectly, leading directly to a national crisis that nearly upset a two-centuries-old orderly transfer of power.

Naturally, therefore, the watchdog media concentrated like a laser beam on ... John Ellis, for his sinister role in helping Fox News accurately project Bush the winner of Florida.

The accusation against Ellis is a pristine example of left-wing scandal-mongering. The allegation is meaningless, even if true. But the truth of the charge doesn’t matter once it has ricocheted through the media sound chamber. All that anyone can remember is that some Republican had to extricate himself from a morass of allegations portraying him as some sort of legal malefactor. This is propaganda by the book: The incessant, mind-numbing repetition “exceeds the individual’s capacities for attention or adaptation and thus his capabilities of resistance.”
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Every conservative public figure would need a full-time investigative and legal staff to refute the endless stream of defamatory attacks. By the time the insinuations are exposed as baseless nonsense, it’s old news, yesterday’s story; the media has “moved on.” Meanwhile it takes DNA evidence that the president lied under oath to get the media to take note of malfeasance by a fellow liberal.

It didn’t take long for the opinion cartel to begin improving upon the story of John Ellis, Evil Malefactor. Their feigned outrage about a Bush cousin working at Fox News was too preposterous for anyone but Howard Kurtz to believe. Thus, in short order, Ellis was also accused of engaging in unethical conduct for having talked to his cousin George W. Bush on election night.

Far from unethical, Bush was a fabulous contact. Political sources provide information VNS numbers can’t. Bush would be gathering his own intelligence directly from governors about voting trends, precinct analyses, recent electoral shifts, and so on.
²⁷
All network decision teams would be trying to gather the exact same information—including the ones who later allowed Ellis to be slandered for having a better contact than they did.

The only thing Ellis couldn’t do was give proprietary VNS data to Bush—or anyone outside of Fox News. This is a well-known prohibition, certainly well known to someone like Ellis, who had covered three presidential elections at NBC News from 1978 to 1989. That Ellis talked to Bush is not evidence that he violated the VNS agreement any more than walking into a bank is evidence that you robbed it. But the irrelevant fact that Ellis talked to Bush quickly transmogrified into the baseless claim that Ellis had, in fact, given Bush proprietary VNS information.

The lead paragraph in one of the
New York Times’s
election articles was this: “Senior executives for the Fox News Channel acknowledged last night that John Ellis, an executive who played a central role in the first decision on election night to project that George W. Bush had won the presidency, and who is a first cousin of Mr. Bush, spent much of the night in communication with the candidate.”
²⁸

Days later,
Times
columnist Paul Krugman elevated the insinuation from the
Times’s
“Hysterical Jeremiad Election Series” to hard fact: “John Ellis, the political analyst now notorious for his inappropriate role at Fox News ... gave Mr. Bush confidential poll information.”
²⁹

This was a pure smear—completely unsubstantiated and utterly implausible. Ellis’s professionalism and integrity had never before been questioned. He expressly denied violating the VNS agreement in a detailed account of the evening. No evidence was ever produced contradicting him.

The accusation exhibited all the earmarks of paranoid liberal reasoning. Even if this “proprietary information” yarn were true—and it wasn’t—it still wouldn’t have altered the fact that Bush won. (Unless Bush has supernatural powers to change county vote totals, in which case we are so lucky to have him as our president!) Liberals might as well have accused Ellis of padding his Fox News expense account and thereby somehow throwing the election to his cousin.

The beauty of a calumny like that against Ellis is that it’s too boring and complicated for the average citizen to listen to for more than ten seconds. The purported infraction always has the aroma of criminality, but the precise details of the indictment are too tedious for anyone to follow. Only liberals could use ennui as a weapon. Using conspiratorial, but actually meaningless, language, liberals blacken the opposition with the very irrelevancy of their charges. They toss out vague unproved allegations, claim the accused “acknowledged” or “did not disavow” some noncontroversial point, and by their indignant tone of voice besmirch a person’s reputation. In paranoid liberal fantasies, this is pretty much how McCarthyism worked.

Classic propaganda “can approve today what it condemned yesterday.”
³⁰
Modern liberals have gotten it down to a matter of hours. On election night, they condemned at 2 a.m. what they had approved at 7 p.m. The incorrect 7 p.m. projection actually altered the vote tally in a presidential election. It was made before the polls had closed. It was wrong. It violated a 1985 agreement with Congress not to announce a state’s results before the polls had closed in that state.
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It was based on data from less than 2 percent of Florida precincts.

Media propagandists called the incorrect projection for Gore merely “a technical problem,” but said the correct call for Bush later in the evening “really humiliated” the networks.”
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No one knows the name of anyone involved in election projections at 7 p.m. There have been well over four hundred news items about the contemptible John Ellis. This is despite the fact that the early call for Gore should have raised red flags all over the media. When ABC called Florida for Gore, three ABC analysts were warning against it.
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The Associated Press called Florida for Gore even though its own internal numbers had Bush winning—but it refused to call Florida for Bush later in the evening when both its internal numbers and the VNS numbers showed Bush the winner.
³⁴
Evidently, the AP was suddenly seized with doubts about VNS’s methodology only when it showed Bush the winner. For doggedly resisting calling Florida for Bush, the AP was praised in the
Los Angeles Times.
³⁵
The fact that AP projected a Gore win in Florida when its own internal numbers had Bush in the lead went unremarked upon.

One rara avis that mentioned the pro-Gore bias in election projections referred to “media-conspiracy theorists”
on both sides:
“One side complained that the networks skewed coverage to help Gore. Others blasted Fox News Channel for tapping a George W. Bush cousin to run its election-night ‘decision desk.’ “
³⁶
Some say the media is liberal, some say it’s conservative, so who’s to say? Indeed, it’s not easy to remember which network first made the incorrect call for Gore. All the networks are blamed jointly for the incorrect Gore projection.

Liberals are so obsessed with the psychological effect of their own loudmouthed propaganda that it never occurred to them that Fox News might have called Florida for Bush because Bush had won. The networks announce election projections tactically, as political strategy. Naturally, they assumed Fox News had to be doing the same. We would never have known this, but for their vicious attack on John Ellis.

This is what happened on election night 2000: Throughout the evening, Gore’s wins were posted rapidly, but all of Bush’s wins consistently demanded further study. This intriguing phenomenon might have been written off as a coincidence if liberals hadn’t revealed their own modus operandi by declaring war on John Ellis at Fox News.

Gore won Maine by 5 percentage points and was declared the winner within 10 minutes of the polls closing. Bush won Colorado by 9 points; it took CNN 2 hours and 41 minutes to make that call. Even Bush’s 15-point margin of victory in Alabama took CNN 25 minutes to project. Bush won North Carolina by 13 points; CNN waited 39 minutes to announce a winner. Bush won Georgia by 12 points; CNN waited 59 minutes.

These were not anomalies.

Arizona, Bush 7 points (51-44) -2 hours, 51 minutes

Michigan, Gore 4 points (51-47) -1 hour, 24 minutes

Arkansas, Bush 6 points (51-45) -3 hours, 42 minutes

Pennsylvania, Gore 4 points (51-47) -1 hour, 24 minutes

Tennessee, Bush 3 points (51-48) -3 hours, 3 minutes

Minnesota, Gore 2 points (48-46) -1 hour, 25 minutes

West Virginia, Bush 6 points (52-46) -3 hours, 16 minutes

Washington, Gore 5 points (50-45) -1 hour, 8 minutes
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No matter how the projections are compared, there was a consistent rush to declare states for Gore throughout the night. Some states were called immediately upon the polls closing; among those, Gore’s average margin of victory was 18 points. Bush’s average was 26 points. Indeed, it took the networks more time to give Bush states he won by 12, 9, or 7 points than to give Gore a state he lost (Florida: 52 minutes).
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If you were trying to conceive of an experiment to test whether the networks’ rapid-fire calls for Gore and languid election projections for Bush were a meaningless fluke or steely-eyed political strategy, you couldn’t do better than being the first to announce Bush had won at two in the morning, and waiting to see if liberals accused you of a political dirty trick. Their intricate analysis of how calling Florida for Bush at 2:16 a.m. created an unstoppable Zeitgeist, a psychological boost, an impression that began the steamroller for Bush, exposed their own motives behind the quick projections for Gore.

Liberals conceive of news reporting as political propaganda and assume, therefore, that everyone else does, too. Their entire election-night coverage was an aggressive partisan campaign on behalf of Gore.

The left’s tendentious naming process is pure political strategy. They think words can alter reality. This was evident in the highly edifying explanations of Florida law during the election mess that liberals had created.

Contrary to anything reported in the mainstream media at the time, Florida law explicitly required Katherine Harris, the Florida Secretary of State, to certify the vote on November 14, seven days after the election. The law states, for example: “If the county returns are not received by the Department of State by 5 p.m. of the seventh day following an election, all missing counties
shall be ignored
and the results shown by the returns on file shall be certified” (Section 102.111).

And again it provides: “Deadline [note helpful title] returns
must
be filed by 5 p.m. on the 7th day following the... general election.” (Section 102.112).

Another section granted Harris discretion to refuse late returns. The discretion resided solely with the secretary of state, not to be confused with “the Florida Supreme Court,” “the U.S. Supreme Court,” “CBS News,” or “the Gore campaign”: “If the returns are not received by the Department [of State] by the time specified, such returns may be ignored and the results on file at that time may be certified by the department.”

There are a lot of murky, complex issues in the law. This wasn’t one of them. The
New York Times
referred to these blindingly clear statutory provisions as “the Republicans
contention
that state law allowed no leeway in the deadline.” Unambiguous statements of the law are known as Republican “contentions.”

In accordance with the law, Harris certified the election returns on November 14. But seven days was not enough time for Gore to steal the election. Though he had lost the election, lost the recount within seven days, and also lost the third manual recount to the point permitted by law, two weeks after the election Gore was asking the Florida Supreme Court (SCOFLA) to give him yet a fourth time at bat. And they did. SCOFLA simply “interpreted” the words “seven days” in the statute to mean “seventeen days.” That actually happened.

Liberals believe hard statutory deadlines are valid only when the Democrat wins. But if the Democrat loses, deadlines are merely helpful suggestions. Gore had lost under the law, so the opinion cartel set about defining the unambiguous seven-day deadline imposed by Florida law as optional. Just a suggestion. Nonbinding thoughts tossed out by the legislature.

Since the media behemoth was now describing a straightforward statement of the law as a Republican “contention,” Harris had no choice but to submit to SCOFLA’s illegitimate, unlawful, not to say risible extension of the clear statutory deadline. This was despite Harris’s insistent protestations that she believed her original certification made seven days after the election—in accordance with the law—was the legally binding one. But Gore still lost.

Thus it was even more stunning that when Gore lost the illegitimate fourth ballot count—unlawfully ordered by SCOFLA and cheered on by the media—the left’s own invented deadline suddenly became the personal beliefs of the secretary of state. In the inestimable reporting of CBS News anchor Dan Rather, the second certification was all Harris’s idea: