FOX Fair and Balanced: Several Versions of the Same Side
Reported by Ellen - November 18, 2004 -
I have not been one of the bloggers saying that John Kerry really won the election. Don't get me wrong - I would not put it past Bush & Co. to have done any number of dirty tricks, especially in Ohio. But unless someone comes up with such solid evidence that there's a real chance to unseat Bush then, in my opinion, we Democrats ought to concentrate on some of the fights we have a better possibility of winning. But an article on FOXNews.com is so closed-minded and one-sided in its report on this story that it makes me wonder if the conspiracy theorists aren't right after all.
Reporter Liza Porteus decries "the conspiracy theory atmosphere that many say is creating a whole lot of something out of nothing" without having quoted a single person who disagrees. Instead she provides quotes from a series of experts who all say there WERE problems, just not any that would affect the presidential outcome.
Ms. Porteus says, "Those '"real' problems included extremely long lines at some polling places, not enough voting machines at others and situations like that in North Carolina, where thousands of votes are missing and the outcomes of two statewide races are still up in the air." (Comment: The quotation marks around "real" seem to indicate Porteus doesn't think the problems were really real.)
However, the lost ballots in North Carolina don't seem to bother Porteus or anyone else in the piece. The next two sentences say, ""One of the good things about Election Day 2004 is that we're getting real data about how things went or how things didn't go,' (Doug Chapin, of the Election Reform Information Project) said. For example, Nevada exit polls suggested that not everybody who got receipt-like forms after they cast their ballots at voting machines with paper trails actually looked at them, or the whole ballot for that matter."
In other words, the "real" data indicates that the problems at the polls were due to voter errors.
Next, we get a quote from FOX's favorite authority on voter fraud, John Fund, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and author of the book "Stealing Elections." Fund says, "The bottom line on all of this is we do have the sloppiest election system of any industrialized democracy... and there are a whole lot of reforms that need to be done so that we don't play Russian Roulette with our elections."
So what are those reforms? Porteus doesn't say but from other FOX stories with Fund, the needed reforms generally involve cracking down on "voter fraud." Funny, now that Bush has won, neither FOX nor Fund is talking much about voter fraud these days.
From there, Porteus skips to the exit polls which showed Kerry ahead of Bush. "As the night wore on and returns began flowing in, it became obvious that the data were downright wrong." How does Porteus know that the exit polls were wrong and the returns right? She doesn't say. Her only proof seems to be that "not one high-profile Democrat within the Kerry camp or party apparatus" has challenged the results and that the returns showed that Bush won by a large enough margin as to require "huge discrepancies" to reverse the election.
Comment: I'm still not ready to claim that Kerry really won the election, not without more proof. But why hasn't "fair and balanced" FOX presented the case for the other side? Why, for example, wasn't Greg Palast or one of the three third-party candidates who have requested a recount interviewed and given a chance to present the specific details of their arguments?
Instead, Porteus concludes with this quote by Fund. "You know, there was a computer in North Carolina that actually ate 4,500 votes. There are genuine problems but we shouldn't be distracted, if we can, by Internet fantasists."
One computer ate 4,500 votes? It's enough to give anyone pause. But rather than figure out how many machines might have eaten, say, 135,000 votes in Ohio, I'd rather we start demanding that Bush attend to these problems NOW before he starts cutting taxes and privatizing social security.
