Winning the Presidency With Full Disclosure

Re “Did NBC Make Call With Welch in the Backfield?” Commentary, Aug. 13: According to U.S. Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), “The pivotal presumption that George W. Bush won the election was the result of the calls the major television networks made on election night. Once those calls were announced, the nearly impossible burden of reversing the presumption shifted to Al Gore.”

Contrary to the claims of my elected representative, one does not assume the White House by “presumption.” There was a vote tabulation. There were two machine recounts. There was an exhaustive manual recount. There have been two subsequent “what if” recounts conducted by the media on behalf of Gore. All have reached the same conclusion: Bush won the state of Florida by a historically narrow margin.

Refusing to accept the legitimacy of the Bush presidency degrades the health of our democracy. Perhaps Waxman could extend his selective outrage to those same networks that called Florida for Gore (and the election, by proxy) with an hour of voting remaining in the Florida Panhandle and three hours of voting left on the West Coast. This was a manifestly irresponsible and, in all likelihood, partisan interference with the outcome of a live election.

Andreas Samson

Los Angeles

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If I were Jack Welch I’d frame that laughable commentary by Waxman. Waxman’s claim that Welch stole the election for Bush by having NBC make an early call would cap his considerable career with an amazing coup.

Never mind that all the other networks did the same; never mind that the early call may have cost Bush hundreds of votes in the Central time zone of Florida; never mind the astounding antics of the partisan Florida Supreme Court; never mind all the futile recounts; never mind that the U.S. Supreme Court voted 7 to 2 to overturn the Florida court (not the 5 to 4 that liberals love to quote). By the way, how come we still haven’t heard all the results of all the newspaper recounts in Florida?

Dick Ettington

Palos Verdes

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Waxman’s commentary is a forceful reminder that we, the lowly public, own the airwaves that are being exploited by these giant conglomerates. We depend on NBC, CBS and other TV networks for the headline winks and jokes for what they call “news.” To fulfill the charter assigned to them through the Federal Communications Commission in 1934--to serve the public interest, convenience and necessity--has become their last concern. But we, the public, should be very much concerned when these giant conglomerates, which wield such control over what the public sees, hears, reads, feels and believes as truth, are allowed to hide behind the 1st Amendment to cloak their fear of an investigation of their actions.

Pete Samuels

Mission Viejo