No one said "Boo" to Bush for years after 9/11. It took the horrors of Katrina before the press started to unshrink their nads and criticise the administration. Neither I nor the article called it a conspiracy theory; we called it a reaction to 9/11. If people react the same way for the same reasons, it doesn't mean that they're in cahoots. In this case, the loony, left-wing, Bush-hating media decided it was better for the country to give him a pass on this and many other things. I agree with them on that choice, as unity was more important at that time than stirring up the moot point of the election.
BUT, that does not mean that history should stay forever edited.
These are conspiracy theories:
"Yet, possibly for reasons of 'patriotism' in this time of crisis, the news organizations 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.'"
"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.
They allege a conspiracy among the funders of the study to underplay the results: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, The Associated Press, The Tribune Publishing Company, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Orlando Sentinel, Cox News Service, The Palm Beach Post, The St. Petersburg Times.
And for all
Consortium New's handwringing about the headlines not matching the results of the study,
The New York Times conceded, "Under some methods, Mr. Gore would have emerged the winner; in others, Mr. Bush" and "the consortium, looking at a broader group of rejected ballots than those covered in the court decisions, 175,010 in all, found that Mr. Gore might have won if the courts had ordered a full statewide recount of all the rejected ballots."
But it also observed that "a close examination of the ballots found that Mr. Bush would have retained a slender margin over Mr. Gore if the Florida court's order to recount more than 43,000 ballots had not been reversed by the United States Supreme Court" and "even under the strategy that Mr. Gore pursued at the beginning of the Florida standoff - filing suit to force hand recounts in four predominantly Democratic counties - Mr. Bush would have kept his lead, according to the ballot review conducted for a consortium of news organizations."
It continued, "In a finding rich with irony, the results show that even if Mr. Gore had succeeded in his effort to force recounts of undervotes in the four Democratic counties, Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Volusia, he still would have lost, although by 225 votes rather than 537. An approach Mr. Gore and his lawyers rejected as impractical - a statewide recount - could have produced enough votes to tilt the election his way, no matter what standard was chosen to judge voter intent."
The article goes on to note irregularities all over the place - ballot design, absentee ballots, overvotes, etc. What it does not find is that the recount that the Supreme Court halted was going to reveal Gore as the winner or that the strategies that Gore's lawyers were pursuing would have resulted in a Gore victory. The notion that Gore was robbed is a falsehood, and the suggestion that the media covered anything up is a conspiracy theory.
