Questions loom over media silence on recounts

"Did Gore win after all?" a headline in last week's issue of the London Telegraph asked in reference to 2000 presidential election. Nobody in the United States appears to care—at least that's how it would seem from reading American newspapers.

GETTY IMAGES Major media outlets seem reluctant to release the results of a Florida recount they commissioned.

The Telegraph article alleged that The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and CNN are not publishing the results of a recount they commissioned from National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago. The media, the article implies, is no longer concerned with publicizing information that might question the legitimacy of President George W. Bush's, DC '68, presidency as a result of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C.

"The hope [of America's liberal newspaper establishment] for a Gore victory appears to have been sacrificed on the altar of patriotism and a perception that America needs to be led into war by a strong president," reporter Charles Laurence wrote in the Telegraph article.

In the months following last year's hotly contested presidential race, rarely a day passed when American newspapers did not prominently feature news about the election. Banner headlines told of butterfly ballots, Florida recounts, and the Supreme Court's ultimate decision to stop the recounts and declare Bush the victor.

But almost a year later, Americans looking for news about the recounts or for the results of this survey would be hard-pressed to find this information in the very same newspapers that sponsored the study.

It remains unclear whether or not the study has been completed, but the Telegraph suggests that it has been and, perhaps more interestingly, that Al Gore may very well have won the election by a significant margin. The article includes a quote from David Povin, a journalist who said that NORC "is deliberately hiding the results of its recount because Gore was the indisputable winner."

Adam Simon, a visiting professor of political science at Yale who teaches classes about the interaction between politics and the media, notes that while he has heard nothing about the alleged recount figures, the fact that newspapers are not pursuing information about it does not surprise him. "It's very likely that [the media] would delay such efforts in the current milieu," he said.

Indeed, following the terrorist attacks on the U.S., political leaders from all parties vowed to place partisan views aside in an attempt to further national unity. "We are resolved to work together not as Democrats or Republicans, but Americans," Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD) said after the attack.

Of course, while it is unclear if NORC has really found that Gore won last year's election, it is clear that they have completed at least a portion of the study. While NORC could not be reached for comment, its website states that they "have now completed all data-collection operations for the Florida Ballot Project."

What is also clear is that there is at least some delay of the release of these results due to the events of Sept. 11. According to NORC, this information has not yet been sufficiently analyzed by the media groups who commissioned the study, and may not be for some time. "No schedule has been set for that process," its website reads. "The media group has postponed release because of the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C."

An NORC employee told the Telegraph that the results were, however, fully ready to be analyzed, and that the media groups have the technology to analyze the new election results.

But all groups involved maintain that at some point the results of the study will be released. Catherine Mathis, a spokeswoman for The New York Times, told the Telegraph that "the intention is to go forward" with the analysis of the study's results.

Yale Political Science Professor David Mayhew believes that it is difficult to support claims that American media outlets are deliberately suppressing evidence that Gore won last year's election. "I haven't heard too much about this, and `suppressing' may not be the correct word to use here," he said. "It's totally possible that they just haven't completed their study yet." He did add, however, that "it may be telling that the media is choosing not to go forward with this information at this time—although I imagine they will in the future."

It is also uncertain what effect these results, whatever they may be, will have on the United States. Simon believes that the effects of any effort to recount the votes would have a negligible effect on the country. "It is very unlikely that such efforts would have any impact," he said. "Even in a different climate."

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