Smith: Punish Media For ‘Broadcast Fraud’
WASHINGTON, Feb. 28–Sen. Bob Smith (R-NH), whose Senate race in 1996 was inaccurately called a failure by CBS News, wants to punish broadcast news organizations that knowingly air false election polling data or closing times.
Late Tuesday night on the Senate floor Smith offered his “broadcast fraud” amendment to the election reform bill that the Senate is now debating. Smith’s amendment calls for fines or prison terms for members of the news media who report false results or report that polls are closed when they are open – as happened in Florida during the 2000 presidential election.
On election night, all major news networks except Fox reported that the Florida polls closed at 7:00 Eastern Time, Smith said. Six Florida counties, however, are in the Central Time zone, so when polls in the Eastern Time zone were closed, 361 precincts were actually open for another hour.
“In the last hour of the election in the Florida Panhandle, 361 precincts were ready to go in that last hour, expecting a rush of people coming home from work, and the public was told, on all of the major networks, that the polls were closed,” Smith said. “The voters in the Panhandle had their votes suppressed.”
Smith said his amendment would “ban false or misleading information” that confuses voters. “The whole issue, rightfully so, by the Democrats in [the 2000 presidential] election was, were the voters confused by looking at these butterfly ballots,” he said. “Yet not a word was uttered about the confusion and absolute flat-out misleading information put out by the media, not by political operatives.”
Smith’s amendment would impose a fine of $10 million and/or a five-year prison term on any outlet with a Federal Communications Commission license for knowingly broadcasting false poll closing times or election poll results.
Smith invited his Senate colleagues to watch a seven-minute video he sent to their offices containing segments of news broadcasts from the night of the contentious election battle between George W. Bush and Al Gore. The video, Smith said, shows newscasters, including ABC’s Peter Jennings, CBS’s Dan Rather, NBC’s Tom Brokaw and CNN’s Judy Woodruff, saying that the Florida polls had closed even though they were still open.
Smith said the tapes show “every one of these networks saying the same thing, over and over and over again, ad nauseam, between 7 and 8 o’clock: The polls are closed in Florida.”
The Committee for Honest Politics, a Republican-oriented group, reported that 19,133 Florida voters were disenfranchised when they did not vote because they believed polls were closed when they were open.
Daniel Perrin, the executive director of the Committee for Honest Politics, received an affidavit from poll workers in Florida who described shock at their thinly attended polling stations in the later hours. A poll worker in Bay County said it was “like the lights went out,” Perrin told the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee last year.
“The panhandle region is 2 to 1 Republican,” Perrin said in an interview. “The media effectively suppressed the votes of thousands of voters.” Lauding Smith for his “courage,” Perrin said, “There’s a large body of people who would never go up against those who own and operate nightly news stories.”
As further evidence of the media’s “wrong,” “misleading” and “arrogant” actions, Smith on Tuesday referred to a letter Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris distributed to the news media on October 30, 2000, “trying to get the media to report the truth eight days before the election.” Harris, he said, requested that the media delay predictions of the outcome of elections until after 8 p.m. EST.
Smith added a personal note to his late-night amendment-touting speech: “Dan Rather, in 1996 on my election, called my opponent and congratulated him on his victory,” Smith said. “Then he called me a couple of hours later wanting to know what went wrong. I said: ‘Nothing went wrong, Dan. I won.’”
Published in The Union Leader, in Manchester, New Hampshire
