When historians sort out what happened to the United States at the start of the 21st Century, one of the mysteries may be why the national press corps ganged up like school-yard bullies against a well-qualified Democratic presidential candidate while giving his dimwitted Republican opponent virtually a free pass.
How could major news organizations, like The New York Times and The Washington Post, have behaved so irresponsibly as to spread falsehoods and exaggerations to tear down then-Vice President Al Gore – ironically while the newspapers were berating him for supposedly lying and exaggerating?
In a modern information age, these historians might ask, how could an apocryphal quote like Gore claiming to have “invented the Internet” been allowed to define a leading political figure much as the made-up quote “let them eat cake” was exploited by French propagandists to undermine Marie Antoinette two centuries earlier?
Why did the U.S. news media continue ridiculing Gore in 2002 when he was one of the most prominent Americans to warn that George W. Bush’s radical policy of preemptive war was leading the nation into a disaster in Iraq? Read more.
This is beat that has been well covered by Somerby, and I think it cuts to the heart of my post yesterday about how our political discourse is skewed significantly to the right. Gore is about as centrist and common sense as you can get, and yet the right-wing narrative of his being a left-wing flake took hold in the so-called liberal media. I wrote yesterday about how we all have narratives that organize reality for us, and as it turns out the common-sense, centrist narrative that Al Gore operates with led him to be right about the war and about global warming when the hard right and the media mocked him for it. What does that say about our media and the way they have been coopted by the skewed right-wing narrative?
An important strategy for the right wing in this country was to attack the media for its left or liberal bias, and in doing so it pulled the MSM to the right. If you accept the basic right/left/center analysis I posted about yesterday, it follows that the so-called liberal bias of the media, was in fact a bias shaped by a centrist imagination that reflected the cultural and political values of the New Deal compromise. The MSM's capitulation in allowing themselves to be defined by the right as left has been an essential element in the right's program to neutralize criticism of that program by a common-sense center. Any critique of the program of the right is now easily dismissed as biased and out-of-touch leftism. It was a remarkable feat of political legerdemain for the right to have accomplished this. And so people who really are on the left like Chomsky and Nader speak, but nobody in the center as it is currently defined listens. Their perspective have been marginalized to irrelevancy.
And the result was evident everywhere, especially in the runup to the Iraq War when widespread dissent was dismissed as flakey leftism. Here's how the media responded to September 2002 speech Gore gave to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco which critiqued Bush's doctrine of preemptive war as a radical departure from decades of American support for international law:
“Gore’s speech was one no decent politician could have delivered,” wrote Washington Post columnist Michael Kelly. “It was dishonest, cheap, low. It was hollow. It was bereft of policy, of solutions, of constructive ideas, very nearly of facts – bereft of anything other than taunts and jibes and embarrassingly obvious lies. It was breathtakingly hypocritical, a naked political assault delivered in tones of moral condescension from a man pretending to be superior to mere politics. It was wretched. It was vile. It was contemptible.” [Washington Post, Sept. 25, 2002]
“A pudding with no theme but much poison,” declared another Post columnist, Charles Krauthammer. “It was a disgrace – a series of cheap shots strung together without logic or coherence.” [Washington Post, Sept. 27, 2002]
At Salon.com, Andrew Sullivan entitled his piece about Gore’s speech “The Opportunist” and characterized Gore as “bitter.”
While some depicted Gore’s motivation as political “opportunism,” columnist William Bennett mocked Gore for sealing his political doom and banishing himself “from the mainstream of public opinion.”
In an Op-Ed piece for The Wall Street Journal, entitled “Al Gore’s Political Suicide,” Bennett said Gore had “made himself irrelevant by his inconsistency” and had engaged in “an act of self-immolation” by daring to criticize Bush’s policy. “Now we have reason to be grateful once again that Al Gore is not the man in the White House, and never will be,” Bennett wrote. [Wall Street Journal, Sept. 26, 2002]
When the conservative pundits addressed Gore’s actual speech, his words were bizarrely parsed or selectively edited to allow reprising of the news media’s favorite “Lyin’ Al” canard from the presidential campaign.
Kelly, for instance, resumed his editorial harangue with the argument that Gore was lying when the former Vice President said “the vast majority of those who sponsored, planned and implemented the cold-blooded murder of more than 3,000 Americans are still at large, still neither located nor apprehended, much less punished and neutralized.”
To Kelly, this comment was “reprehensible” and “a lie.” Kelly continued, “The men who ‘implemented’ the ‘cold-blooded murder of more than 3,000 Americans’ are dead; they died in the act of murder on Sept. 11. Gore can look this up.” Kelly added that most of the rest were in prison or on the run.
Yet, Kelly’s remarks were obtuse even by his standards. Gore clearly was talking about the likes of Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, who indeed had not been located. [Kelly later died in a vehicle accident in Iraq.]
Still, the underlying theme running through the attacks against Gore and other critics of Bush’s “preemptive war” policy was that a thorough debate would not be tolerated. Rather than confront arguments on their merits, Bush’s supporters simply drummed Gore and fellow skeptics out of Washington’s respectable political society.
More than four years later, with more than 3,200 U.S. soldiers dead and possibly hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead too, the consequence of the news media’s hostility toward Gore is more apparent.
Maybe the question we need really to understand is why Gore's critics were taken more seriously than Gore. In hindsight they all look ridiculous, but to the average American this "Gore is a crazy liar narrative" was the collective conventional wisdom. It's a very strong statement about who controls the narrative in this country, and it's not the so-called liberal media. The whole sorry story about how Gore lost the 2000 election and the tragic consequences that followed is a massive indictment of how our media is vulnerable to be exploited by the distortions and propaganda of the right wing. If criticism of the war by a centrist ex-Vice President of the United States can be marginalized so easily and so stupidly, no wonder the political left in this country has no voice.
For another post on the skewed media treatment of Gore see this May 2006 piece entitled "Whom the Gods Would Destroy."