Steve McAlexander on Sat, 13 Oct 2001 19:48:01 +0200 (CEST)


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RE: [Nettime-bold] Silence on Dimpled Chads,



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Wow, you mean how about a silent takeover of this country by corporate
interests? A coup de tat?   Hey when your daddy is a former CIA director and
a former President too.... magic can happen if you have the right
connections, right?

Hey besides what's the difference if its fascism or totalitarianism that we
live under anyway right. Right now the American people would know the
difference; they no longer think for themselves.  No one cares about
discussing anything just acting out of anger and just generally doing things
we have always done them.  So many of us still thinks....hahahahahha

The enemy is our country's leadership not necessarily OBL he is demanding a
redressing of wrongs done to his people something we should consider
extracting from our country's leadership and make them accountable to the
people before it is too late.







It is error alone which needs the support of government.  Truth can stand by
itself.
 -- Thomas Jefferson
One man with courage makes a majority........
Abstraction is not our enemy unless it is thought to be our only friend.
- Graham Dunstan Martin
 Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.
- - Walter Lippmann
 Thinking men cannot be ruled . . . Ayn Rand

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- -----Original Message-----
From: nettime-bold-admin@nettime.org [mailto:nettime-bold-admin@nettime.org]
On Behalf Of Beatrice Beaubien
Sent: Saturday, October 13, 2001 12:10
To: nettime-bold@nettime.org
Subject: [Nettime-bold] Silence on Dimpled Chads, was Re: <nettime>
Anti-globalisation movements

>That problem is increased when an American
>president acts for the corporations that paid for him rather than the
>people who elected (sic) him

Which reminds me.

DId this story get much play last week in the US?

___________________________________

U.S. media forget about dimpled chads


By JOHN IBBITSON, Globe and Mail
Thursday, October 11, 2001  Print Edition, Page A1

WASHINGTON -- Just weeks ago, it would have been the biggest story in the
land: A final, comprehensive audit would reveal whether Al Gore or George W.
Bush should be president. Today, it seems to be nobody's news.

A consortium of major U.S. news organizations has decided unanimously not to
analyze and report the results of the $1-million (U.S.) audit they
commissioned to identify which presidential candidate received the most
votes in Florida in last November's election.

By "spiking" the story, they have raised questions about whether the
country's biggest media conglomerates are suppressing news that potentially
could tarnish the image of Mr. Bush in the midst of the President's war on
terrorism.

"I find it truly extraordinary that they have made this decision," said Jane
Kirtley, media ethics specialist at the University of Minnesota. "I am so
chilled by what is going on."

The Supreme Court, in ordering an end to the recounting of votes in Florida
last December, effectively handed the presidency to Mr. Bush. But there was
evidence that, had accidentally mismarked ballots such as the famous
"dimpled chads" been properly scrutinized, Mr. Gore might have won the state
and the presidency.

Last January, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street
Journal, Associated Press, Newsweek, CNN and several other news
organizations banded together and commissioned the University of Chicago's
National Opinion Research Center to conduct a comprehensive examination of
the ballots not officially counted in the Florida result. The centre was
charged with examining each of about 180,000 uncounted ballots, reporting on
which marks are on each ballot.

The survey was completed around the end of August, Julie Antelman, a
spokeswoman for the centre, said. Reporters and editors from each member of
the consortium were then to review the survey and attempt to discern how
each voter had intended to vote, and who, on that basis, won Florida.

But shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon, the consortium unanimously agreed not to proceed with the
analysis.

To choose deliberately not to report major news is a remarkable decision for
them to take. But they say the decision was taken because of a lack of
resources and that the war on terrorism has made the story irrelevant.

"Right now, we don't have the time, the personnel or the space in the
newspaper to focus on this," Catherine Mathis, vice-president of corporate
communications at the New York Times Co., said in an interview. "There's a
much bigger story right now."

Work on the Florida recount, she said, has been "postponed indefinitely."

"Our belief is that the priorities of the country have changed, and our
priorities have changed, and we need to marshal our person-power and our
financial resources to cover the events of Sept. 11 and its aftermath," said
Steven Goldstein, vice-president of corporate communications for Dow Jones &
Co., which publishes The Wall Street Journal. "When times have settled down,
I'm sure all of this will come out. But not in the next few weeks."

There have been previous efforts to examine rejected Florida ballots in an
attempt to divine the intent of the voters who cast them, including a survey
by The Miami Herald that suggested Mr. Bush indeed won the state.

But the study commissioned by the news consortium was by far the most
detailed and objective. Because antiquated voting machines were used in
Florida and the punch-card ballots were complicated, many votes were marked
as spoiled when a machine failed to punch cleanly the ballot's chad -- the
bit of paper to be punched out.

To help divine voter intent, each of 180,000 uncounted ballots was examined
by a three-person panel, and its marking described. Was the chad "dimpled,"
(bulging, but intact)? Hanging by one or three corners? Could light be seen
through the intended hole?

The results were tabulated in a set of tables. "The National Opinion
Research Center has completed its part of the task," Ms. Antelman said.
"What remains is for the media group to request the data set."

Neither the centre nor the consortium knows whether the data suggest that,
had the uncounted votes been tallied, Mr. Gore or Mr. Bush would have won
the state. Mr. Goldstein rejected the suggestion that the media might be
avoiding the story for fear of embarrassing the President in a time of
national crisis.

"It has absolutely nothing to do with that whatsoever," he said. "The
priorities have changed. People are focused on the fact that we're at war."

But "to say it is not a story any more is an utterly ingenuous thing to
say," Prof. Kirtley said. "Of course it's still a story, whatever are the
results of that audit.

"They should just do it."
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