Vanity Fair published an article describing the treatment Al Gore received back in 2000 from the mainstream media. I am not talking about so-called right-wing media, but about the New York Times and the Washington Post. The author of the article did not just ask Gore and his staffers what they thought about the way the media depicted him, she also talked to journalists themselves and asked them why they did what they did. Read the entire article, it is a fascinating read about how journalists purposefully distort what someone says and purposefully create a caricature because it is more fun like that, they sell more newspapers / get more viewers, and because they personally – get this – did not like Gore because he refused to chitchat with them.
Back in the day – I did not most know of this since, well, I am only 23 years old now, so that would have made me 16 back then – Time‘s Margaret Carlson admitted to Don Imus: “You can actually disprove some of what Bush is saying if you really get into the weeds and get out your calculator, or look at his record in Texas. But it’s really easy, and it’s fun to disprove Al Gore. As sport, and as our enterprise, Gore coming up with another whopper is greatly entertaining to us.”
I find it amazing that journalists admit this. One would expect them to be a bit embarrassed about their misbehavior and lack of journalistic standards, but no; for some strange reason, they are proud of it. For example, here is Howard Kurtz, Washington Post columnist: “Everything is fair game in a presidential campaign and part of the test of any candidate is how he deals with an often skeptical press corps.… The press sets up a series of obstacle courses … and if you are Al Gore and considered to be super-smart, yet not particularly gregarious, it’s the moments of awkwardness or misstatements that are going to get media attention. If Gore had had a lighter touch, he probably could have overcome that.”
Kurtz was greatly surprised that Gore did not care to chitchat with reporters who misquoted him and who tried to make him look as bad as possible. This, according to Kurtz, only made matters worse: they already went after Gore, but Gore’s refusal to chitchat with them made them want to go after Gore even more.
Are these journalists or children?
What’s worse, these people seem to have no problem with destroying an entire career as long as they’ve got ‘fun.’ When I read the article at Vanity Fair I got a very uncomfortable feeling, realizing that if they did this in 00, they are bound to do it again in 2008 (and now already). The media narratives are already created, and we can only expect them to repeat what they did in 00. I do not care who they do it with; Democrat or Republican or both, but I do care about honest and truthful reporting.
I suggest we all keep an eye on the narratives created in the msm. About Mitt Romney, for instance, there is the “robot-like, too smooth, flipflopper” narrative. John Edwards is depicted as the ultimate hypocrite. Those are just two examples, from both sides of the aisle, of how the media creates a caricature and then builds on it. Y’all have more examples? Lets keep an eye on this.
As for Gore, he mainly lost because of himself. He was the vice-president of an incredibly popular president. The economy was doing well, foreign policy wise went OK, domestically he could simply built on what Clinton had done… He should have won easily. Having said that, the way the media treated him certainly did not help and, more importantly, it is disgraceful that professional journalists would act like that.
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