How the Traditional Media Went After Gore
Well, it only took the traditional media about seven years to re-examine their vicious and mendacious coverage of Al Gore back in 2000. Vanity Fair gives us some context and insight on how the traditional media went after Gore, while deciding that they’d rather have a beer with the preppy faux-cowboy, Bush:
The media began the coverage of the 2000 election with an inclination not so different from that demonstrated in other recent elections—they were eager for simple, character-driven narratives that would sell papers and get ratings. “Particularly in presidential elections … we in the press tend to deal in caricatures,” says Dan Rather, who was then anchoring for CBS. “Someone draws a caricature, and it’s funny and at least whimsical. And at first you sort of say, ‘Aw shucks, that’s too simple.’ In the course of the campaign, that becomes accepted wisdom.” He notes, “I do not except myself from this criticism.”
In 2000, the media seemed to focus on a personality contest between Bush, the folksy Texas rogue, and, as The New York Times referred to Gore, “Eddie Haskell,” the insincere brownnoser from Leave It to Beaver. ABC anchor Claire Shipman, who covered the 2000 campaign for NBC, says, “It was almost a drama that was cast before anyone even took a good look at who the candidates were.”
George Bush made it easy—he handed them a character on a plate. He had one slogan—compassionate conservatism—and one promise aimed squarely at denigrating Bill Clinton: to restore honor and integrity to the White House. He was also perceived to be fun to be with. For 18 months, he pinched cheeks, bowled with oranges in the aisles of his campaign plane, and playacted flight attendant. Frank Bruni, now the restaurant critic for The New York Times but then a novice national political-beat reporter for the same newspaper, wrote affectionately of Bush’s “folksy affability,” “distinctive charm,” “effortless banter,” and the feather pillow that he traveled with.
But Gore couldn’t turn on such charm on cue. “He doesn’t pinch cheeks,” says Tipper. “Al’s not that kind of guy.” With Gore still vice president, there was a certain built-in formality and distance that reporters had to endure. Having served the public for nearly 25 years in different roles—from congressman legislating the toxic-waste Superfund to vice president leading the charge to go into Bosnia—Gore could not be reduced to a sound bite. As one reporter put it, they were stuck with “the government nerd.” “The reality is,” says Eli Attie, who was Gore’s chief speechwriter and traveled with him, “very few reporters covering the 2000 campaign had much interest in what really motivated Gore and the way he spent most of his time as vice president: the complexities of government and policy, and not just the raw calculus of the campaign trail.”
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A study conducted by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center and the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that 76 percent of stories about Gore in early 2000 focused on either the theme of his alleged lying or that he was marred by scandal, while the most common theme about Bush was that he was “a different kind of Republican.”
At the time, the only people seeming to notice the media’s missteps were journalists at the fringes or out of the mainstream, including Somerby of the Daily Howler, Robert Parry on consortiumnews.com, and Eric Boehlert on Salon, as well as mere citizens who had no outlet but the telephone.
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One obstacle course the press set up was which candidate would lure voters to have a beer with them at the local bar. “Journalists made it seem like that was a legitimate way of choosing a president,” says Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter. “They also wrongly presumed, based on nothing, that somehow Bush was more likable.” Chris Matthews contends that “the likability issue was something decided by the viewers of the debates, not by the commentators,” but adds, “The last six years have been a powerful bit of evidence that we have to judge candidates for president on their preparation for the office with the same relish that we assess their personalities.”
Maureen Dowd boiled the choice between Gore and Bush down to that between the “pious smarty-pants” and the “amiable idler,” and made it perfectly clear which of the presidential candidates had a better chance of getting a date. “Al Gore is desperate to get chicks,” she said in her column. “Married chicks. Single chicks. Old chicks. Young chicks. If he doesn’t stop turning off women, he’ll never be president.”
“I bet he is in a room somewhere right now playing Barry White CDs and struggling to get mellow,” she wrote in another.
Meanwhile, though Dowd certainly questioned Bush’s intellect in some columns, she seemed to be charmed by him—one of the “bad boys,” “rascals,” and a “rapscallion.” She shared with the world a charged moment between them. “‘You’re so much more mature now,’ I remarked to the Texas Governor. ‘So are you,’ he replied saucily.” And in another column: “You don’t often get to see a Presidential candidate bloom right before your eyes.”
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And Gore just kept going on about issues. Alluding to five speeches he made in two months on education, crime, the economy, faith-based organizations, and cancer research, Seelye wrote, “Mr. Gore becomes almost indignant when asked if his avalanche of positions might overwhelm voters.” The Washington Post’s David Broder later found Gore too focused in his convention speech on what he’d do as president. “But, my, how he went on about what he wants to do as president,” wrote Broder. “I almost nodded off.” As for the environment, while Gore was persuaded by his consultants not to talk about it as much as he would have liked, whenever he did, many in the media ignored it or treated it as comedy. Dowd wrote in one column that “Al Gore is so feminized and diversified and ecologically correct, he’s practically lactating.” In another, referring to his consideration of putting a Webcam in the Oval Office, she wrote, “I have zero desire to see President Gore round the clock, putting comely interns to sleep with charts and lectures on gaseous reduction.”
The trivial continued to dominate during the postmortem following Gore and Bush’s first debate, on October 3, 2000. The television media were sure Gore won—at first. But then Republican operatives promptly spliced together a reel of Gore sighing, which was then sent to right-wing radio outlets. Eighteen hours later, the pundits could talk of little else. “They could hear you audibly sighing or sounding exasperated as Governor Bush was answering questions,” Katie Couric scolded him the next day on the Today show. “Do you think that’s presidential behavior?” For the Times’s Frank Bruni, the sighs weren’t as galling as Gore’s familiarity with the names of foreign leaders. “It was not enough for Vice President Al Gore to venture a crisp pronunciation of Milosevic, as in Slobodan,” he wrote. “Mr. Gore had to go a step further, volunteering the name of Mr. Milosevic’s challenger Vojislav Kostunica.”
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The Gores, a famously close-knit family, could laugh at the coverage some. They joked around at the nonstop talk about which president you’d want to have a beer with. The Gore’s middle daughter, Kristin, pointed out, “Gee, I want the designated driver as my president.” But down deep they weren’t laughing. “The sighs, the sighs, the sighs,” says Gore, of the debate coverage. “Within 18 hours, they had turned perception around to where the entire story was about me sighing. And that’s scary. That’s scary.”
That is scary. Unfortunately, one would think that the traditional media would — after some self-examination — change their ways; however, as the Vanity Fair article concludes about a possible Gore run in 2008:
Another question—in light of countless recent stories about John Edwards’s haircut—might be: Would the media revert to the old media?
