Most people just keep the ignorant troll in their killfile.

"james g. keegan jr." wrote:

UNITED STATES: Recount reveals Bush was defeated in Florida

BY ROBERT PARRY

Al Gore was the choice of Florida’s voters — whether one counts
hanging chads or dimpled chads. That was the core finding of the
eight news organisations that conducted a review of disputed
Florida ballots.

Gore won even if one doesn’t count the 15,000-25,000 votes that
USA Today estimated he lost because of illegally designed
“butterfly ballots”, or the hundreds of predominantly African-
American voters who were falsely identified by the state as
felons and turned away from the polls.

Gore won even if there’s no adjustment for George Bush’s windfall
of about 290 votes from improperly counted military absentee
ballots where lax standards were applied to Republican counties
and strict standards to Democratic ones, a violation of fairness
reported earlier by the Washington Post and the New York Times.

Put differently, George Bush was not the choice of Florida’s
voters anymore than he was the choice of the American people who
cast a half million more ballots for Gore than Bush nation-wide.
The spin

Yet, possibly for reasons of “patriotism” in this time of crisis,
the news organisations that financed the Florida ballot study
structured their stories on the ballot review to indicate that
Bush was the legitimate winner, with headlines such as “Florida
Recounts Would Have Favored Bush” (Washington Post, November 12,
2001).

Post media critic Howard Kurtz took the spin one cycle further
with a story headlined, “George W. Bush, Now More Than Ever”, in
which Kurtz ridiculed as “conspiracy theorists” those who thought
Gore had won.

“The conspiracy theorists have been out in force, convinced that
the media were covering up the Florida election results to
protect President Bush”, Kurtz wrote. “That gets put to rest
today, with the finding by eight news organizations that Bush
would have beaten Gore under both of the recount plans being
considered at the time.”

Kurtz also mocked those who believed that winning an election
fairly, based on the will of the voters, was important in a
democracy. “Now the question is: How many people still care about
the election deadlock that last fall felt like the story of the
century — and now faintly echoes like some distant Civil War
battle?” he wrote.

In other words, the elite media’s judgment is in: “Bush won, get
over it.” Only “Gore partisans” — as both the Washington Post and
the New York Times called critics of the official Florida
election tallies — would insist on looking at the fine print.

While that was the tone of coverage in these leading news
outlets, it’s still a bit jarring to go outside the articles and
read the actual results of the state-wide review of 175,010
disputed ballots.

“Full Review Favors Gore”, the Washington Post said in a box on
page 10, showing that under all standards applied to the ballots,
Gore came out on top. The New York Times’ graphic revealed the
same outcome.

This core finding of Gore’s Florida victory in the unofficial
ballot recount might surprise many readers who skimmed only the
headlines and the top paragraphs of the articles. The headlines
and leads highlighted hypothetical, partial recounts that
supposedly favoured Bush.

Buried deeper in the stories or referenced in subheads was the
fact that the new recount determined that Gore was the winner
state-wide, even ignoring the “butterfly ballot” and other
irregularities that cost him thousands of ballots.

The news organisations opted for the pro-Bush leads by focusing
on two partial recounts that were proposed — but not completed —
in the chaotic, often ugly environment of last November and
December.

If the news organisations had simply given the American people
the unvarnished facts, the reality that the voters of Florida
favoured Al Gore might have bolstered the belief that Bush indeed
did steal the White House. That, in turn, could have undermined
his legitimacy during the current crisis over terrorism.

[Abridged from <http://www.consortiumnews.com>.]