Maybe it's a slow news day for Pandagon. That's the conclusion I come to when I read drivel like this whining that the press just wasn't fair to Al Gore in 2000.
If you haven’t read this article in Vanity Fair about the way the mainstream media, out of the usual combination of laziness and mendacity with an extra dose of the hate that sleazy people have for their moral superiors, went after Al Gore in the 2000 election, do. I’m sure that you know the story, but having it all in one place is sort of a stunning demonstration of how the collective political media completely abandoned even pretending that their job is to serve the public interest in favor of rigging the election for Bush. And, sadly, it was due in no small part to the fact that media seems to be clogged up with self-absorbed bullies who just have an urge to stick it to a nerd like Al Gore. It’s an impressive display of how so-called journalists not only don’t have penalties for dealing in unadulterated bullshit, but they get rewarded.
Here is the link to the Vanity Fair article.
The amusing part is that these same people thought Dan Rather faking documents from George Bush's Air National Guard record and releasing 25-year-old DUI records was "responsible journalism." The same people complaining about Al Gore being skewered over "inventing the Internet" have no problem discussing George Bush's supposed cocaine problem or Laura Bush murdering someone. They consider that to be legitimate news.
I agree that I wish more attention had been paid to Gore's sleazy behavior in office. You know, like his illegal fundraising activities, or the fact that he must have been asleep at the switch when Osama bin Laden was blowing up American targets around the globe and at home. Yeah, I wish there had been more attention paid to his blind eye--the one he turned to all sorts of Clinton malfeasance. But I didn't mind journalists making Gore look just plain stupid, I'll admit it.
As I pointed out over at Pandagon, George Bush received three times the negative publicity of John Kerry before the elections of 2004. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I'd say it was just the liberal media at work. And while I do believe there is some of that (witness Dan Rather's debacle or the October surprise that went wrong), I'm sane enough to recognize that the person in office gets more scrutiny than the person who hasn't got a record. Amazing how that works, eh?
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