Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
The political press has been armed with plenty of attitude in taking on the vice president -- but not a lot of facts.
Oct 27, 2000 | At the height of the press's fib-frenzy following the first presidential debate, that week in early October when political reporters and pundits were obsessed with examining Vice President Al Gore's supposed "embellishments," veteran Baltimore Sun columnists Jack Germond and Jules Witcover weren't content using the exaggeration examples lifted from the debate. Instead, they did some gum-shoeing and uncovered yet another telling instance where the VP had inexplicably stretched the truth.
Their resulting, cringe-inducing column may not stand as the worst piece of political commentary this fall season, but it certainly illustrates just how badly the political press has stumbled in covering Gore's campaign.
An unmasked contempt has run through much of the coverage of the vice president's run, an out-of-context scorn targeted not at Gore's positions, but at Gore the man. The phenomenon explains why Gore's press has been, at times, wildly hostile and often blatantly dishonest. Take Germond and Witcover.
At a rally in Warren, Ohio, held on the day after the first debate, a buoyant Gore told assembled supporters in passing that they represented "probably the biggest crowd we have had in this campaign year." Note the qualifier "probably."
But Germond and Witcover pointed out that some reporters on the campaign trail that day "remembered at least one larger crowd for Mr. Gore in Pittsburgh." How many people were at the Pittsburgh rally? Readers have no idea. How many were in Warren? Again, no clue. But according to Germond and Witcover, the Warren event was smaller, therefore the rally was not "the record-setter [Gore] had claimed."
Did Gore ever claim Warren was a "record-setter"? No, that's the columnists' phrase. Does the mangled anecdote define trivial pursuit? Yes, although Germond and Witcover thought otherwise: "It raised the question: Why did he say it? He had to know otherwise." Indeed, the duo built an entire critical column around a manufactured incident.
Such derisiveness is routine. In Thursday's New York Times, reporter Kevin Sack mocked Gore for his small talk on the campaign trail with a 5-year-old. "Ian, you're really in kindergarten?" Gore asked. The exchange, Sack wrote, was "less than edifying."
What explains such nonsense? Turning the tables on the growing army of armchair psychologists who've spent so much time seizing on Gore's missteps in the name of analyzing his personality shortcomings, could the media's hostility toward the vice president be symptomatic of something larger? Could it actually be payback, passive-aggressive style? Last week, Wall Street Journal columnist Albert Hunt argued exactly that: "Some news people remain furious that Bill Clinton got away with bald-faced lies in the Monica Lewinsky episode." Revenge, therefore, can now best be served by attacking his understudy.
There's also the primal instinct reporters have for wanting to spotlight the dirt on the clean linen, the scratches on the silver. Bush seemed to relish sullying his own image in 1999 -- admitting to being "young and irresponsible" and a battle with the bottle -- before reporters got a chance to. Gore, in both demeanor and through his own campaign pitch, is the quintessential straight-arrow. What better sitting duck is there for a reporter covering a (potentially career-making) presidential campaign?
Whatever the reasons, reporters have crudely inserted themselves into the presidential campaign with careless and misleading reports about Gore's so-called exaggerations (journalists literally created Gore's "Love Story," Love Canal and "inventing the Internet" episodes out of whole cloth). In the process, they have become Gov. George Bush's most potent allies.
