This afternoon I read Evgenia Peretz’s Vanity Fair feature, “Going After Gore” about the media’s bias against Al Gore during the presidential campaign of 2000. It was enraging to read things like:
“Gore was speaking to a group of students at Concord High School, in New Hampshire, about how young people could effect change. He described a letter he had received as a congressman in 1978 from a girl in Toone, Tennessee, about how her father and grandfather had gotten mysteriously ill. He had looked into the matter and found that the town was a toxic-waste site. He went on:”‘I looked around the country for other sites like that. I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. I had the first hearing on that issue and Toone, Tennessee. That was the one you didn’t hear of, but that was the one that started it all.… We passed a major national law to clean up hazardous dumpsites, and we had new efforts to stop the practices that ended up poisoning water around the country.… It all happened because one high-school student got involved.’
“Jill Hoffman, a high-school senior in the audience who was helping to film the event, says, ‘I remember thinking, I really, really like what he has to say.’ But what [reporters] zeroed in on was Gore yet again claiming credit for something he didn’t do—’discovering’ Love Canal[...]. In addition to mischaracterizing his somewhat ambiguous statement, they misquoted him, claiming he said, ‘I was the one that started it all,’ instead of ‘that was the one that started it all.’
The story picked up steam. ‘I was the one that started it all’ became a quote featured in U.S. News & World Report and was repeated on the chat shows. On ABC’s This Week, host George Stephanopoulos said, ‘Gore, again, revealed his Pinocchio problem.’”
Or this:
“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.’”
Liberal media, you say? How might things be different today if the media were at least objective, rather than conservative, which is what any reasoned analysis shows them to be?
So, after becoming thoroughly enraged by that report, in the same magazine I read a wonderfully entertaining piece on The Simpsons, and their 18-year history that cheered me up, plus, looked at some pictures of Nicole Kidman, that lifted my spirits. I think she’s stunning, but Miriam says she’s ugly. Miriam has some very discriminating taste when it comes to the ladies.
Filed under: Politics, Rantings, Television on September 4th, 2007 | No Comments »