Reply #25: Here's the letter I sent Ted Koppel before tonight's broadcast ...

[Fly by night]

... and I spoke with his senior producer by phone to make sure they knew it was coming. I told the producer what I said in the letter. They could begin to behave like competent, responsible patriotic American journalists or they could keep being crack whores for Karl Rove (well, I was a bit more polite.)
So here's my letter:
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To Ted Koppel:

Given how very dismissive ABC has been so far in its coverage of the 2004 election theft, I am concerned about how you will present the story tonight. Your promo for tonight's program already suggests that you will once again be dismissive. You do this at your own peril. According to Annenberg, approximately 30% of the American people now believe the 2004 election was stolen. That's a 50% increase in the number of people who hold that belief in just the past six weeks.

You only show your own uninformed, complacent, incredulous or perhaps (in the eyes of many Americans) co-conspiratorial position if you dismiss the evidence for the 2004 election theft. You must know by now that -- even though the corporate media is still holding back from releasing the full exit poll data (for what useful reason escapes us) -- the complete final national exit poll data (not the incomplete early "leaked" data your promo refers to) have already been released on-line by a New Zealand media organization who bought the complete data before Mitofsky stopped responding to requests for it. Those data have been analyzed and those analyses are now widely available. Maybe that's why 100 million Americans believe the election was stolen.

You must also know that the analyses of Dr. Steven Freeman of the University of Pennsylvania are based on the final exit poll data available to all of us directly off CNN at midnight on election day -- once again not the early data leaked on the Internet that your promo refers to. Dr. Freeman's analysis indicates that someone is twice as likely to win PowerBall with a single ticket than that the discrepency between the exit polls and the "reported" vote in just three states -- OH, FL and PA -- occurred by chance. Other analysts -- again using the complete state-level exit poll data (available on CNN at midnight on election night) put the likelihood that the discrepencies between the final exit polls and the "reported" vote in 16 states occurred by chance at 13.5 trillion to one.

Finally, another analysis by Dr. Freeman demonstrates the election theft without using exit poll data. Simply put, Freeman looked at people who voted in 2004 and distributed them according to their self-reported 2000 voting status and their 2004 voting decision within three categories:

1) 2000 Gore or Bush voters who voted for Kerry or Bush in 2004,
2) 2000 3rd party voters who voted in 2004 for Kerry or Bush, and
3) New voters in 2004.

These categories should include all voters for Kerry or Bush in 2004. With this analysis, Freeman has shown that approximately 4.3 million votes were switched from Kerry to Bush between the time the votes were cast and the time the votes were counted. Here's the table from one of the appendices to Dr. Freeman's paper (which is attached):

(Guys, I can't get the Freeman table to line up right in this post. I basically used a simplified version of Freeman's table 2.2 on page 24 in the appendix from his updated paper. Wish I could get it to line up because it is a KILLER table. Here's a link to the full paper and appendix: http://truthout.org/unexplainedexitpoll.pdf )

Suffice it to say, if Nightline does not include Dr. Freeman or another of the many reputable researchers whose work has documented the 2004 election theft in your broadcast tonight, your presentation will be incomplete. Further, if your program once again makes light of or dismisses the overwhelming evidence for the 2004 election theft, you will cement your status as a co-conspirator in this unprecedented rape of democracy.

Of course, ABC could always be the first network to release the complete exit poll data and reports to the American public. If you don't, what do you know and when did you know it? And one more question: just what are you knowingly hiding?

Assuredly, (me)