New York Times, Washington Post suppress media recount of Florida vote (Barf Alert)

A consortium of major American news organizations, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, has decided to withhold the results of its recount of ballots cast in Florida in the 2000 presidential election. The consortium had planned to publish its report this week, and although its decision to suppress its own findings has received virtually no media attention, the reason is made clear in a September 23 column by New York Times Washington bureau chief Richard L. Berke.

In a column that enthusiastically welcomes the dissolution of all political opposition in Washington in the wake of the September 11 terror attacks, Berke writes: “Until September 11, the capital was riding a historically partisan period, with leading Democrats still portraying their president as ‘appointed’ by the Supreme Court. In a move that might have stoked the partisan tensions—but now seems utterly irrelevant—a consortium of new organizations, including The New York Times, had been scheduled this week to release the results of its ambitious undertaking to recount the Florida presidential ballots. (That has been put on hold indefinitely).”

In other words, the Times and its counterparts in the consortium have decided to conceal from the American people facts damaging to the Bush administration’s claims to political legitimacy. They are doing so for the express purpose of suppressing dissent and bolstering the president as he prepares to take the American people into war and makes sweeping attacks on their civil liberties.

This act of self-censorship is entirely in keeping with the overall response of the media to the events of the past two weeks—a response that in coming years will be widely seen as among the most shameful episodes in the history of American journalism. Neither in the broadcast nor the print media is there any attempt whatsoever to examine the claims of the Bush administration. All statements emanating from the White House and the Pentagon, even those known to be lies, are presented to the public as good coin.

What “now seems utterly irrelevant” to Berke is the fact the very government which is committing the population to a war of undefined duration and dimensions, with all of the tragic consequences this entails, was installed through the suppression of votes and judicial fiat. Berke voices his own cynicism toward the theft of the 2000 election when he writes: “The indecisiveness of last year’s election gave the nation a civics lesson, but one that lent itself to snide jokes, not grave consideration.”

This attitude, so crudely expressed and brazen in its contempt for democratic principles, cannot come as a surprise to anyone who has seriously considered the trajectory of news reporting in the US over the past decade. It says a great deal about the role of the media and the outlook that pervades editorial offices and network news bureaus.

The media, however, does not exist in a void. Its degeneration reflects more profound tendencies within society and the political system.

The suppression of the Florida recount, and the Times’ justification for it, exemplify the role of the media as a de facto organ of the state. Journalists like Berke, who occupy prominent positions within the media establishment, no longer conceive of themselves, even remotely, as protectors of democratic institutions and the rights of the people, with a responsibility to inform and educate the public so that it can assert its interests in opposition to those who wield power.

One component of bourgeois democratic institutions in the US was the traditional conception of the press as the “Fourth Estate,” an independent force that served as a check on the power of the state. This notion, often enough expressed more in the breach than in the observance, and always attenuated by corporate control of the media and the innumerable ties that existed between the media establishment and state agencies, including the CIA, has now been thoroughly eroded and repudiated. Today, media operatives overwhelmingly, and as a matter of course, conceive of their task as the defense of the corporate elite and the state, as against the right of the people to know.

The debasement of the US media can be traced in relation to the great political convulsions of the past 30 years. During the Vietnam War and the Watergate crisis, major news organs such as the New York Times and the Washington Post played a significant role in exposing the lies of successive administrations, culminating in the exposure of the criminal and authoritarian actions of the Nixon administration. In the aftermath of Watergate, however, there was a determined campaign to bring the media more tightly to heel, to which the media succumbed with relatively little resistance.

Today it is all but inconceivable that the Times would publish anything comparable to the Pentagon Papers, or the Washington Post anything like the series of exposures that ultimately led to the resignation of Richard Nixon.

Already by the time of the Iran-Contra crisis of the mid-1980s, the element of press cover-up for the unconstitutional actions of the Reagan administration far outweighed that of serious investigation and exposure. With the Persian Gulf War of 1991, the media assumed the role of conduit for the propaganda handed down by the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon. The networks and the press submitted with barely a whimper to unprecedented restrictions on the reportage of battle preparations and the actual conduct of the war. To this day, the American media have not revealed the number of Iraqis killed and wounded in that uneven slaughter.

In the 1990s the role of the media assumed an even more pernicious form. Leading newspapers such as the New York Times and the Washington Post lent their prestige to the series of scandals mounted by the Republican right to destabilize the Clinton administration. They became sounding boards for a thoroughly anti-democratic conspiracy by extreme right-wing forces to remove an elected president from office.

Berke’s newspaper, the Times, played a particularly vile role. Times reporter Jeff Gerth lent credibility to the anti-Clinton machinations of unreconstructed segregationist elements, Christian fundamentalists and sections of the Republican leadership with his series of articles in the early ’90s on the Whitewater affair—articles based on little more than speculation and rumor. The Times later embraced the Monica Lewinsky scandal and unswervingly depicted the sex-based witch-hunt led by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr as a legitimate investigation, downplaying Starr’s attacks on civil liberties. In this manner the Times legitimized the political conspiracy that culminated in the impeachment of Clinton.

Within weeks of Clinton’s acquittal by the Senate, Gerth and the Times were at it again, publishing a series of witch-hunting articles against Los Alamos nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee. These tracts provided a platform for sections of the Republican Party that were simultaneously seeking to create a Cold War-style hysteria against “Communist” China, and brand Clinton as a traitor, who supposedly traded nuclear secrets to the Chinese government in return for campaign contributions in the 1996 election. The biased and sensationalist character of Gerth’s reporting was exposed when the federal case against Lee collapsed. In the end, the Times was compelled to issue a public apology.

The political wars of the 1990s revealed the profound erosion of American democratic institutions. The Republican Party had been largely taken over by extreme right-wing and fascistic forces, and the Democratic Party had proven itself incapable of opposing their attack on democratic rights.

In the 2000 election, the outcome of this protracted political decay was expressed in a fundamental break with democratic traditions and procedures. The Republican Party, with the tacit support of the media, set out to steal the presidential election, and with the aid of the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court, succeeded. It met with no serious resistance, either during or after the theft of Florida’s electoral votes, from the Democrats.

The 2000 election demonstrated that within the American ruling elite, including both capitalist parties and the media establishment, there exists no significant constituency for the defense of democratic rights. The decision of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other major news outlets to suppress the results of their Florida recount underscores this fact. It demonstrates that the break with democratic forms of rule that occurred last year was irrevocable.

Now, as the Bush administration hurtles toward war and launches an unprecedented drive to strengthen the police powers of the state and dismantle democratic safeguards, the Times and the rest of the media hail the suppression of political opposition and the de facto establishment of one-party rule as a positive good.

The American people must take heed: the ruling elite is well on the way to establishing an authoritarian, anti-democratic state.

No serious resistance to such a course will emerge from within the political establishment. That must come from a politically united and independently organized working class movement, fighting with its own party on the basis of a socialist program committed to the defense of democratic rights.

About the World Socialist Web Site

The World Socialist Web Site is the Internet center of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). It provides analysis of major world events, comments on political, cultural, historical and philosophical issues, and valuable documents and studies from the heritage of the socialist movement. The WSWS aims to meet the need, felt widely today, for an intelligent appraisal of the problems of contemporary society. It addresses itself to the masses of people who are dissatisfied with the present state of social life, as well as its cynical and reactionary treatment by the establishment media. Our Web site provides a source of political perspective to those troubled by the monstrous level of social inequality, which has produced an ever-widening chasm between the wealthy few and the mass of the world's people. As great events, from financial crises to eruptions of militarism and war, break up the present state of class relations, the WSWS will provide a political orientation for the growing ranks of working people thrown into struggle. We anticipate enormous battles in every country against unemployment, low wages, austerity policies and violations of democratic rights. The World Socialist Web Site insists, however, that the success of these struggles is inseparable from the growth in the influence of a socialist political movement guided by a Marxist world outlook. The standpoint of this Web site is one of revolutionary opposition to the capitalist market system. Its aim is the establishment of world socialism. It maintains that the vehicle for this transformation is the international working class, and that in the twenty-first century the fate of working people, and ultimately mankind as a whole, depends upon the success of the socialist revolution. The partisanship of the World Socialist Web Site by no means excludes objectivity or honest debate. We welcome a broad exchange of viewpoints with workers, students and intellectuals who are seeking an alternative to bourgeois politics and capitalist economics. Polemics and debate, the dialectical means by which knowledge and truth are established, are an integral component of the WSWS. Only intellectual integrity and commitment to historical truth are required of those who wish to contribute to the site. Articles and correspondence can be submitted to editor@wsws.org The World Socialist Web Site and the international working class The financial crisis that began in Asia and is enveloping the entire world economy poses sharply the need for the international unification of working people. Transnational production and global financial markets have changed the face of capitalism forever. In the past two decades the limited social safety nets in the advanced countries have been torn up, while workers have suffered wave after wave of layoffs and an erosion in their real income. In the less developed countries, national development programs have been cast aside, while free trade zones and other cheap labor schemes have been established to facilitate the unrestrained exploitation of workers. To the extent that the old organizations of the working class-whether they called themselves communist, socialist, or labor-have remained wedded to the nation state, they have proven themselves incapable of responding to this assault on jobs, living standards and basic rights. The World Socialist Web Site, published by the coordinated efforts of ICFI members in Asia, Australia, Europe and North America, takes as its starting point the international character of the class struggle. It assesses political developments in every country from the standpoint of the world crisis of capitalism and the political tasks confronting the international working class. Flowing from this perspective, it resolutely opposes all forms of chauvinism and national parochialism. We are confident that the WSWS will become an unprecedented tool for the political education and unification of the working class on an international scale. It will help working people of different countries coordinate their struggles against capital, just as the transnational corporations organize their war against labor across national boundaries. It will facilitate discussion between workers of all nations, allowing them to compare their experiences and elaborate a common strategy. The ICFI expects the world audience for the World Socialist Web Site to grow as the Internet expands. As a rapid and global form of communication, the Internet has extraordinary democratic and revolutionary implications. It can enable a mass audience to gain access to the intellectual resources of the world, from libraries and archives to museums. In the fifteenth century Gutenberg's invention of the printing press played a critical role in breaking the control of the Church over intellectual life, undermining feudal institutions, and fostering the great cultural revival that began with the Renaissance and ultimately found expression in the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. So today the Internet can facilitate a renewal of revolutionary thought. The International Committee of the Fourth International intends to use this technology as a tool for the liberation of the working people and oppressed all over the world. Comments and suggestions on the design of the WSWS can be made to designer@wsws.org The International Committee of the Fourth International The World Socialist Web Site, founded by the International Committee of the Fourth International, arises on the basis of a powerful political history. It represents the historical continuity of the political and theoretical struggle initiated by Leon Trotsky in 1923 against the growth of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union. After playing a central role in the Russian Revolution and Civil War and the rebuilding of the economy, Trotsky emerged as the leading figure in the socialist opposition to the bureaucratic caste that arose in the 1920s, and the nationalist orientation of this emerging elite. The Stalinist apparatus usurped political power from the Soviet working class, betrayed the ideals of the October Revolution and carried out many of the greatest crimes of the twentieth century. Trotsky's life work culminated in the founding of the Fourth International in 1938, just two years before his assassination by a Stalinist agent. The collapse of the Stalinist regimes in 1991 was the most profound confirmation of the struggle of Trotsky and the Fourth International. Trotsky had insisted, as early as 1936, that the Stalinist bureaucracy was pursuing a course leading inevitably toward the restoration of capitalism. He explained that it had become a conscious political opponent of the revolutionary and egalitarian aspirations of the international working class. All the proclamations in recent years about the death of socialism and Marxism conspicuously avoid or belittle the significance of Leon Trotsky and the Fourth International. This is not surprising, for any honest assessment of this political tradition flies in the face of the vulgar and historically dishonest evaluations offered by the professional defenders of capitalism. In the writings and speeches of Trotsky one finds the international socialist alternative to Stalinism that reactionary historians insist did not exist. All readers are urged to join the International Committee of the Fourth International and one of its affiliated political parties, or inquire about establishing new parties of the International Committee in countries where it does not presently have sections by writing to icfi@wsws.org. Contact details for the ICFI sections are listed at About the ICFI. Financial donations are also needed to assist in the development and maintenance of the site. In particular we urge our readers to consider a regular monthly contribution. Details on how to make a donation are provided at Donate to WSWS.
			==================== In case you were curious about who these bozos are.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.