Miami-Dade Recount Closed to Press; GOP Unhappy
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 20, 2000; Page A7
From dueling news conferences to televised court hearings, each twist and turn of the Florida election saga has been chronicled by the press – until now.
The Miami-Dade canvassing board voted unanimously yesterday to bar reporters from watching the recount that is scheduled to begin this morning. The three-member board rejected a request by Republicans to allow a pool reporter representing the press corps to watch the process of reviewing the 654,000 ballots, as has been the case in the Palm Beach County recount. The board offered no public explanation.
Texas Gov. George W. Bush's presidential campaign, which has harshly criticized the manual recount process, was not pleased.
"This is the presidency of the United States," spokesman Ari Fleischer said. "It's proper and fitting for the press to be in close observation of these recounts. It's deeply troubling that the press is not free to be in the room to watch. Certainly, the presence of the press has a chilling effect on any shenanigans in politics."
Montana Gov. Marc Racicot (R), a close ally of Bush, told reporters that the board "won't let the press in the room to hear, to see, to understand and to document what's really going on."
Chad Clanton, a spokesman for Vice President Gore's newly formed Recount Committee, said Democrats were not opposed to the media's presence but raised no objection when the canvassing board voted to exclude reporters.
"We want the most open and fair process possible," he said. "But at the same time, we want to respect the canvassing board because they're taking their job seriously and doing a good job."
The networks in particular prefer to have live pictures of the recounting process. Now television cameras will have to shoot through a window.
Spokesmen for ABC and NBC expressed concern. "Obviously, we'd like to have access to the events unfolding in Florida as we have for the past 12 days, and we hope they reconsider," an ABC official said.
Bush spokesman Ed Gillespie said a pool reporter would have been useful yesterday, when the board was doing the preparatory work of running ballots through machines to segregate the questionable ones.
The process was stopped after 90 minutes in a dispute about whether the workers had been properly trained, and no journalist was able to report on just what happened, Gillespie said. |
