The Graham family embraced neoconservatism, too, favoring aggressive policies against Moscow and unquestioned support for Israel. Soon, the Washington Post and Newsweek editors were reflecting those family prejudices.
I encountered that reality when I moved from AP to Newsweek in 1987 and found executive editor Maynard Parker, in particular, hostile to journalism that put Reagan's Cold War policies in a negative light. I had been involved in breaking much of the Iran-Contra scandal at the AP, but I was told at Newsweek that "we don't want another Watergate." The fear apparently was that the political stresses from another constitutional crisis around a Republican president might shatter the nation's political cohesion.
The same was true of the Contra-cocaine story, which I was prevented from pursuing at Newsweek. Indeed, when Sen. John Kerry advanced the Contra-cocaine story with a Senate report issued in April 1989, Newsweek was uninterested and the Washington Post buried the story deep inside the paper. Later, Newsweek dismissed Kerry as a "randy conspiracy buff." [For details, see Robert Parry's Lost History.]
Fitting a Pattern
In other words, the vicious destruction of Gary Webb following his revival of the Contra-cocaine scandal in 1996 -- when he examined the impact of one Contra-cocaine pipeline into the crack trade in Los Angeles -- was not out of the ordinary. It was part of the pattern of subservience to the national security apparatus, especially under Republicans and right-wingers but extending to Democratic hardliners, too.
This pattern of bias continued into the last decade, even when the issue was whether the votes of Americans should be counted. After the 2000 election, when George W. Bush got five Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court to halt the counting of votes in the key state of Florida, major news executives were more concerned about protecting the fragile "legitimacy" of Bush's tainted victory than ensuring that the actual winner of the U.S. presidential election became president.
After the Supreme Court's Republican majority made sure that Florida's electoral votes -- and thus the presidency -- would go to Bush, some news executives, including the New York Times' executive editor Howell Raines, bristled at proposals to do a media count of the disputed ballots, according to a New York Times executive who was present for these discussions.
The idea of this media count was to determine who the voters of Florida actually favored for president, but Raines only relented to the project if the results did not indicate that Bush should have lost, a concern that escalated after the 9/11 attacks, according to the account from the Times executive.
Raines's concern became real when the news organizations completed their unofficial count of Florida's disputed ballots in November 2001 and it turned out that Al Gore would have carried Florida if all legally cast votes were counted -- regardless of what standards were applied to the famous chads -- dimpled, hanging or punched-through.
Gore's victory would have been assured by the so-called "over-votes" in which a voter both punched through a candidate's name and wrote it in. Under Florida law, such "over-votes" are legal and they broke heavily in Gore's favor. [See Consortiumnews.com's "So Bush Did Steal the White House" or our book, Neck Deep.]
In other words, the wrong candidate had been awarded the presidency. However, this startling fact became an inconvenient truth that the mainstream U.S. news media decided to obscure. So, the major newspapers and TV networks hid their own scoop when the results were published on Nov. 12, 2001.
Instead of stating clearly that Florida's legally cast votes favored Gore -- and that the wrong man was in the White House -- the mainstream media bent over backwards to concoct hypothetical situations in which Bush might still have won the presidency, such as if the recount were limited to only a few counties or if the legal "over-votes" were excluded.
The reality of Gore's rightful victory was buried deep in the stories or relegated to data charts that accompanied the articles. Any casual reader would have come away from reading the New York Times or the Washington Post with the conclusion that Bush really had won Florida and thus was the legitimate president after all.
The Post's headline read, "Florida Recounts Would Have Favored Bush." The Times ran the headline: "Study of Disputed Florida Ballots Finds Justices Did Not Cast the Deciding Vote." Some columnists, such as the Post's media analyst Howard Kurtz, even launched preemptive strikes against anyone who would read the fine print and spot the hidden "lede" of Gore's victory. Kurtz labeled such people "conspiracy theorists." [Washington Post, Nov. 12, 2001]
An Irate Reporter
After reading these slanted "Bush Won" stories, I wrote an article for Consortiumnews.com noting that the obvious "lede" should have been that the recount revealed that Gore had won. I suggested that the news judgments of senior editors might have been influenced by a desire to appear patriotic only two months after 9/11. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Gore's Victory."]
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