RIGGED: C. Boyden Gray & Elise Passamani: How the media nearly stole the 2000 election for Al Gore.

To hear the mainstream news media retell the story of the contentious 2000 presidential election, one would think that it all boils down to Bush v. Gore. The Supreme Court decision created huge controversy and poisons public life to this day. But this focus on the decision serves to obscure an act of great duplicity on the part of the media that dwarfs the impact of that case: namely, that if it hadn’t been for actions they took on television on Election Night, November 7, 2000, there never would have been a Bush v. Gore or a Florida recount in the first place.

It is a story of voter suppression. As it turns out, most of what we think was important about that election—hanging chads, butterfly ballots, 36 days of legal jousting—is unimportant. And by 8 p.m. Eastern Time on Election Night, a cover-up had already begun. . . .

The northwesternmost part of Florida is the Panhandle, which stretches along the Gulf of Mexico to Alabama. Often called the “Redneck Riviera,” it is the most Republican part of Florida, regularly giving Republicans big margins in state and national elections. The nine Panhandle counties that are farthest west—Bay, Calhoun, Escambia, Holmes, Jackson, Okaloosa, Santa Rosa, Walton, and Washington—are in the Central Time Zone, and one additional county, Gulf, is split between Central and Eastern Time. According to the Miami Herald, “It is only a few miles to the Alabama border from anywhere in the western Panhandle, but more than five hundred miles and a cultural light-year to Miami.”

On Election Night, between 6:30 and 7:50 p.m. Eastern, anchors on all the major networks and cable channels reported over and over again that the polls in all of Florida closed at 7 p.m. Eastern. Not once did anyone on ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News Channel, NBC, or MSNBC inform the audience that Florida has two time zones and two poll closing times. During that hour and 20 minutes, 13 journalists asserted a total of 39 times that there was only one poll-closing time throughout the entire state of Florida.

There were five anchors who handed out this misinformation more than once—Cokie Roberts on ABC, Brian Williams on MSNBC, Judy Woodruff on CNN, Tom Brokaw on NBC, and Dan Rather on CBS. Their words are slight variations on the same theme, interwoven with trivia and banter.

For instance, Tom Brokaw said, “we want to point out to our viewers that in half an hour, at 7 o’clock Eastern Time, we have a group of critical states that will be closing their polls, including the state of Florida.” A few minutes later, he repeated himself, saying, “the polls will close in Florida, as we said just a few moments ago, at 7 Eastern Time tonight.” Brian Williams said, “Just a reminder that we are minutes away from the 7 o’clock hour here in the East when several major states close down the polls. Biggest of them all: Florida.” Minutes later, Williams said: “Seven o’clock here in the East. The polls in six new states have just closed and the lead story at this hour is the state of Florida is too close to call. The state everyone said yesterday would be the story here today and, thus, tonight. It is at this hour too close to call, even though the polls there have closed.”

But the polls there had not closed. Voters in the 10 counties in the Central Time Zone still had an hour left to vote.

They never make mistakes like this in the GOP’s favor, do they?