Transcript
Mike's Pockets
November 17, 2001
BOB GARFIELD: Welcome back to On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. From time to time -- okay, once -- our producer at large Mike Pesca comes on the show to talk about different media news items and it's a little feature we like to call What's in Mike's Pockets. And he's back now. Hello, Mike!
MIKE PESCA: Hi, Brooke!
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Okay so your story this week is about the consortium of newspapers that went back to Florida and attempted to do the definitive re-count of the election which decided the presidency. They spent a whole lot of money to do it, but the story got delayed and it was pushed back and pushed back and it finally did run this week.
MIKE PESCA: Right. Over a month ago Dan Keating who ran the Washington Post's part of the consortium came on our show and he explained that there was no conspiracy of silence around this. They just wanted to have enough newspaper writers to have the time to focus on what the story should say and they also wanted to give the public enough distance from September 11th so that they could focus on this story which they obviously felt was important enough to spend over a million dollars on.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Okay, so they waited for just precisely that right moment, and a few minutes after the papers hit your porch, an American Airlines flight bound for the Dominican Republic crashes in Queens and the electronic media is 100 percent distracted.
MIKE PESCA: Yeah, you're right about that. The story only made one sentence on all the evening newscasts that night. It was mentioned in a lot of the morning shows. You could tell they were gearing up to cover this story. But on TV once the plane crashed you didn't hear about the story at all. So it was a really weird effect where every paper that morning had big, big coverage of a story that almost no one in the general public actually noticed. And that's what got me interested. So what I did is I went just around New York and I tried to get a representative sample of what the people took away from the story.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Dylan, roll that tape!
MIKE PESCA: What did the newspapers find?
MAN: It indicated that Bush would have won.
MAN: I didn't go past the headlines or just the tables, but it's - it, it seemed to show that Bush, Bush won the election.
MIKE PESCA: Who won the election?
WOMAN: Well actually my understanding that, that Bush, Mr. Bush.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Who won?
WOMAN: Gore!
MAN: I think they confirmed that Mr. Bush did in fact win.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Okay so what do we hear? We hear Bush, Bush, Bush - Gore - Bush. It doesn't sound like the papers gave them a clear answer.
MIKE PESCA:Yeah, that confusion probably meant they just read the papers, because the papers were all over the place on this. The real answer - I mean the bottom line is who got more votes. That answer is Gore. Now there are other details like if Gore actually had won his case before the Supreme Court, he probably still wouldn't have won the election. Interesting, and it belongs in the stories, but the papers were actually putting that as the main headline, and then having oh, interesting detail, he actually got more votes in the body of the piece.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Okay, so you had a bunch of people who didn't quite the full story. Maybe they didn't give the papers the complete perusal that may have yielded those results. What did you do? Did you - did you offer a tutorial?
MIKE PESCA: You know I kind of broke with the tradition of the man on the street interview and I turned it into an open book test. [LAUGHTER] What I did was I brought several newspapers with me. I let them read through the coverage. And then afterwards we got together and discussed.
MIKE PESCA: How about I give you two, I give you two, and then we'll, we'll get together and we'll decide who won Florida. Okay?
WOMAN: Okay.
MAN: All right.
MIKE PESCA: Go ahead, read away.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And so what exactly did you show them?
MIKE PESCA: I showed them four papers. One was the Washington Post -- headline of the Washington Post - Florida Recounts Would Have Favored Bush. Subhead: But Study Finds Gore Might Have Won Statewide Tally of All Uncounted Ballots. I showed them the Wall Street Journal headline: In Election Review, Bush Wins Without Supreme Court Help. I showed 'em the Daily News: Full Florida Recount Favored Gore. Study. And then I showed 'em the New York Times: Study of Disputed Florida Ballots Finds Justices Did Not Cast the Deciding Vote. So the Times headline primarily concerned itself with the Supreme Court.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And so how did the people react to this-- mass of confusion?
MIKE PESCA: Well here it is!
WOMAN: Well it would have been nice to-- to know who really won, you know?
MIKE PESCA: Yeah, it would be, wouldn't it.
WOMAN: This doesn't help at all.
MAN: Oh, this is really the - you know I didn't even catch any of this.
MAN: They're not going to give you an honest count. You're never - we're never going to know.
MAN: You know you picked out four ma--major media here who they all kind of - they all kind of think alike!
MIKE PESCA: So does that make you want to read more or make you throw up your hands in frustration and run away from the story?
WOMAN: This point, yes, you're right - I'm going to throw up my hands and say to hell with it right now.
MIKE PESCA: That's it.
WOMAN: That's exactly how I feel.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:But Mike -- the papers did face a very difficult problem! I mean this election was unbelievably close, and there were several counting scenarios where Bush would have won and it isn't the whole story to say that Gore wins.
MIKE PESCA: Right. And the papers I guess did have a tough time because they knew that half their readership probably wouldn't like what they read either way that they put it, so that's why they were - in my opinion, hedging their bets a little too much. I mentioned before that TV didn't really get to cover the story, but Good Morning America did get to it before the plane crashed, and the way they covered it was kind of indicative of what you saw. I can't believe that they would phrase it this way, but what they said: Finally a comprehensive media review of last year's presidential election in Florida indicates that under all recount scenarios but one, the results probably would not have changed. Talking about all the scenarios but one -- the one scenario where he would have won is if you counted all the ballots! That's why all these papers got together! That's why they spent the million bucks! They didn't spend the million bucks to see well who would have won if they counted only hanging chads. They didn't spend a million bucks to find out who would have won if they counted partial chads. They wanted to know who got the most votes, and here you have a situation where they actually found out that answer -- and no one knows about it. And, you know, maybe, maybe history will sort it out, but right now I don't think the public knows.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Mike, I think you're just bent on afflicting the comfortable.
MIKE PESCA: [LAUGHS] I just want a free subscription.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: OTM's producer at large, Mike Pesca. [MUSIC]