The media are often accused of chasing the flotsam and jetsam in the news at the expense of real issues, which is understandable if you spend a day watching the drivel on cable TV networks.
But most newspaper reporters who cover everything from small towns to the Pentagon work hard to reveal the gut of things, and in the past few weeks they’ve been at their tenacious best in Tallahassee.
They’ve been digging into the office of Secretary of State Katherine Harris — specifically the hard drives on four computers — and uncovering information about what was going on before and during last year’s election fiasco.
And what have they unearthed from Harris, who insisted she put up a “firewall” between her office and the George W. Bush campaign in Florida, which she co-chaired?
Pre-election speeches endorsing Bush; e-mails between lawyers in her department and Bush lawyers discussing how to count “chad” on disputed ballots; and drafts of speeches declaring Bush the winner before the Palm Beach County recount was done.
So much for the firewall.
“It doesn’t matter if you think she interpreted the law strictly or tipped the election in his favor. The decisions she made did tip the election to George Bush, and the information on those hard drives point to that,” says John Wark, the Tampa Tribune’s bureau chief in Tallahassee.
“The public has a real right to understand where the law began and ended in making those decisions, and where personal philosophy and partisan politics came in,” says Paige St. John, the Tallahassee bureau chief for Florida Today and two other Gannett-owned Florida newspapers.
The records became an issue after the New York Times reported in July that two GOP operatives working in a room outside Harris’ office helped her craft statements on overseas military ballots during the recount.
The Times also reported it had been told by Harris’ office that some computer data had been erased which, if true, would have been illegal.
“That’s something local (elected) people go to jail for. It was not a trifling matter,” says S.V. Date, the capital’s bureau chief for the Palm Beach Post.
The press immediately wanted access to the computers but Harris said no, claiming the hard drives were not public record. Attorney General Bob Butterworth told her they most certainly were, unless exempted by the Legislature.
She relented, but first hired her own expert to examine the hard drives. He said nothing had been destroyed. Not satisfied, more than a dozen media organizations, including Florida Today, got together and hired their own experts.
They turned to Ontrack Data International, a Minnesota firm that has worked for the CIA and FBI and specializes in recovering lost data.
“It made sense to kind of level the playing field so that each news organization had access to them (the hard drives) at the same time and could do with them what they wanted,” says Wark. “I think we all agreed it was in the public interest that this information get out.”
Ontrack determined some information had been deleted, but said it appeared the loss was an accident when the operating systems were recently changed. They also were able to recover the data, which became the focus of the stories.
That kind of digging has angered some people who say the media won’t leave the election alone, but it’s precisely what the press should be doing in Harris’ office and throughout government in its role as a watchdog.
“The first two weeks of the election crisis moved so quickly and changed so dramatically that the media, and the public, couldn’t keep up,” says St. John. “And the only way to know what happened is to go back and do an exhaustive review.”
Says Date: “The historical value of knowing 50 or 100 years from now is important. Something like this is unlikely ever to be repeated.”
