It felt like I was in Florida, huddled under an umbrella in a drenching downpour. April 6, 2001, was not a good day for a demonstration, and besides, wasn't this one a little late? Why were the activists from DemocracyMarch.org still raging nearly three months after the son of a Bush was selected as president, a succession to power the overlords of the media and our political system had long since accepted as "legitimate"?

They were outside the Manhattan studios of the Fox News Channel to protest what they called a media blackout of a stolen election. It was the first time that activist voices, representing an outrage that still simmers in a significant number of Americans, confronted the media directly and questioned their role in sanctioning the disputed election's outcome.

The demonstrators accused Fox of being a "participant in the election, not merely an 'observer,' " according to their flyer. "Ever since then the media have failed to call into question Bush's lack of a mandate, and politicians seem poised never to launch an official investigation into the Florida irregularities or enact meaningful voter reforms." A number of speakers argued that the presence of Bush cousin John Ellis on the network's election-decision desk indicated a partisan orientation.

The most focused attack on Fox's role was offered by Mark Crispin Miller, a New York University professor who directs the Project on Media Ownership. "The coverage through the race was extraordinarily biased, " he said. "The election was decided through a massive civil rights violation, and the American media ignored it completely." Time only permitted him to skim the surface of the critique of a network, which, in the words of Daphne Eviatar in a recent Nation cover story, Murdoch's Fox News, has created "a calculated mouthpiece for the right that remains thinly veiled behind its misleading mantra 'fair and balanced.' " Miller drew some jeers from his own supporters when he also noted that the losing candidate, Al Gore, had just hosted Fox-owner Rupert Murdoch in his journalism class at Columbia University, suggesting that their friendly relationship may be why Gore has been silent on the media role. "We need more than election reform," he concluded. "If democracy is to be revived, we need thorough media reform as well."

Foxy Surprises
Fox had some slick surprises waiting for the protesters. Roger Ailes, the former Reagan-Bush No. 1 media advisor who now runs the channel, had posted a tongue-in-cheek "Welcome Project Blackout" on the electronic ticker on the building's outer wall. He even sent out an urn of coffee for the protesters with a tiny "Courtesy of Fox News" sign on it. This nice touch went untouched. He also invited one of the activists on the air to add the appearance of impartiality. Offering critics a one-shot appearance is an old tactic of image reinforcement. And Fox News specializes in hectoring liberals. I experienced it myself when I was interviewed by Bill O'Reilly some time ago. He fancies himself the populist voice of the common man, but when it came to talking about the media he was a company man, as befits someone who has joined the big leagues of the multimillion dollar TV hosts.

Fox's ideological boosters were on the barricades, too. A handful of counter-protesters offered chants like "Bush won six times," a reference to recounts that allegedly confirmed his victory. (The scene appeared surrealistic: a woman passing by reacted to one of the counter-protesters, a young man who seemed especially strident and repetitive, by saying in a thick West Indian accent, to no one in particular: "I don't think he took his medication.") One woman from the très conservative Web site FreeRepublic.com was on hand distributing a pamphlet titled "Is Fox News Right Wing or Merely Right?" I later saw her picture on a Web site called MediaWhoresOnline giving an award to Fox News' Brit Hume; the site notes "incriminating quotes from the account by one of the wackos in attendance: 'Brit Hume acknowledged Free Republic and the impact we had during the presidential election.' "

The site also quotes a bizarre defense of his own work by Fox News' Tony Snow, delivered in response to mild criticism by the Free Republic. Snow's words show how Fox News personalities, under monitoring and pressure from those even more to the right than themselves, hew to a distinct line and proudly brag about how they serve the conservative cause. For the most part, Fox doesn't talk about its cozy relationships with such hard-liners, taking refuge instead behind its deceptive slogan "We Report, You Decide." The protesters mocked that with their own versions, such as "They Distort, They Decide."

Meanwhile, there have been more reports on the recent media recounts of the election. The reports continue to obscure what happened, just as many press accounts underreported the manipulations in the voting and vote counting in Florida when they occurred.

Examples:
o In March, The Palm Peach Post reported that the butterfly ballot cost Al Gore the election in Palm Beach County. This was barely reported nationwide. According to Frank Rich of The New York Times: "It felt like an episode of 'The Twilight Zone' to pass through Florida last weekend. There, splashed over most of the front page of Sunday's Palm Beach Post, was the paper's investigative scoop: Palm Beach County's butterfly ballot cost Al Gore 'about 6,600 votes, more than 10 times what he needed to overcome George W. Bush's slim lead in Florida.' It felt like 'The Twilight Zone' because beyond Palm Beach — or Boca, at any rate — who knew or cared? I turned on my TV and had to search to find a mention of the Post's story. It might as well have been a hallucination. This is less an indictment of the national media than a political reality," but it is an indictment of the media nonetheless.

o On April 4, The Miami Herald generated even more confusion. They reviewed 64,248 Florida ballots and concluded that George W. Bush would have prevailed had the U.S. Supreme Court permitted a recount of Florida's disputed votes. Like earlier press reports, this was misleading. The Nation reported: "As the Herald editors themselves concede, there is no way of knowing whether a real recount would have produced a Bush win because 'there is no way to be certain how canvassing boards in each county would have judged each ballot.' A Herald editorial even acknowledged that had 'every mark, dimple, pinprick or hanging chad' that appeared to suggest a voter's intention to support either Bush or Gore been counted, 'Gore would be in the White House today.' "

Concluded Nation columnist John Nichols: "The post-election waters are as muddy today as they were on the morning of November 8, when bleary-eyed television anchor men retracted their retractions of their previous retractions and finally admitted, 'We still really don't know who was elected president.' "

o Fairness and Accuracy in Media issued a blast at USA Today's April 4 version of the Miami Herald piece. "USA Today's investigation also found something else — something it chose not to tell its readers: The official hand counts in the remaining seven Florida counties, completed before the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in, had missed hundreds, even thousands, of potential Gore votes. If those votes had been properly counted, under two of the four counting standards used by the paper to determine valid votes, Gore would have won the entire state by 300 to 400 votes."

Will we ever know the full story? Not if we don't ask more questions. As Alex Jones of Harvard University's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, wrote months ago in The New York Times: "The answer is tough investigations of what happened in the voting and the vote counting, uncompromised by the false notion that avoidance of controversy will be healing. The answer is also tough reporting on what happened in Florida that does not confuse fairness with the unsatisfactory practice of quoting one strident position and then its opposite in every story. Without question, there needs to be more reporting."

And more reporting not just about the election, but the media coverage of it, which continues to attract criticism, even as the federal regulators at the FCC recently dismissed a complaint from a television viewer alleging bias and declined to mount their own probe of media coverage of the election, another story that — no surprise — much of the media missed. (For Danny Schechter's reporting of election coverage, click here.)

Why this lack of media interest? One theory suggests that media inattention is due to news managers being aware of poll data that show that most Americans are alienated from electoral politics. After all, 55 million eligible voters did not take part in the election. Harvard's Vanishing Voter Project has been tracking this massive rejection of the way politics is played. In each weekly study leading up to the 2000 election, an increasing number of people found the campaign more boring than exciting. The entertainment orientation of the media system leaves less and less space for ideas and information that programmers suspect viewers might find "boring." In his introduction to this year's Project Censored report, long-time media analyst Noam Chomsky argues that the depoliticization of politics is quite functional for a manipulative, top-down political system that depends on less participation rather than more. Voter turnout correlates with income in a country where, he says, participation is the most class skewed in the industrial world. (In this respect, it was interesting to learn that Vice President Dick Cheney paid taxes on $36 million this year, President Bush on just under $900,000.) Chomsky says the dominance of media is 100 percent corporate, "with a total absence of socialist or laborite mass media," and that this is a significant factor in shaping the discourse of elections, what gets covered and what doesn't. He believes this is all intentional and built into how the system works. His conclusion: "The system works."

It would be wrong to become fatalistic, even if your critique leads you to the conclusion that the cards are stacked against a meaningful democracy. Some, like English scholar Colin Crouch, believe we are effectively moving into a post-democratic era. "The democratic moment has passed," he argues in a pamphlet for Britain's Fabian Society. "As power becomes increasingly concentrated in the hands of a professionalized, political elite and — importantly — in the corporate sector, the potential for the mass of ordinary people to participate actively in public life is diminished."

Diminished, perhaps, but it ain't over yet, as the protesters at Fox News made clear. The legitimacy of the government, the electoral system and the media system — what we call the "mediacracy" in MediaChannel's new book "Hail to the Thief" — is still in question even if the mainstream media have moved on.

— Danny Schechter (danny@mediachannel.org) MediaChannel executive editor Danny Schechter produced 10 documentaries with Globalvision, where he serves as vice president and executive producer. He is the author of "Falun Gong's Challenge to China: Spiritual Practice or 'Evil Cult'?" (Akashic Books, 2000) and co-editor of "Hail to the Thief: How the Media 'Stole' the 2000 Presidential Elections" (Innovatio, 2001)

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