Call Bob Somerby `butter' because he is on a roll. The
Daily Howler shreds Joe Klein's new book, rips Arianna and Maureen Dowd and the rest of the gang that helped torpedo Al Gore in 2000, but for whom now--magically--the scales have fallen from their eyes. Somerby may not be everyone's cup of tea, he has frequent bouts of monomania, his interpretation of the Plame affair was problematic at best, his desire to be evenhanded is sometimes wrongheaded, his taste in movies is questionable, and I certainly would not countenance his opinion of Colbert's performance at the Press Dinner. All that said, Somerby knows the 2000 campaign debacle backwards and forwards. He has read it all and explained, countless times, how the press screwed Gore royally in 2000. The fact that the media has collective amnesia over that episode is a serious problem. If the press cannot learn from history then they (and we) are doomed to repeat it. So how to change the future, how to alter the press script?
The fact that the media (SCLM, MSM, punditocracy, whatever you want to call them) acted so disgracefully in 2000 is a fact that should be known everywhere and yet it appears to be a closely guarded secret. The Daily Howler has documented the constant stream of lies that the media were responsible for spreading, not the right-wing smear machine but the NYT and WaPo, in many cases the press essentially concocted these tales, many of which lie half-forgotten: Love Story, Love Canal, earth tones, alpha male, but the theme was unforgettable--Al Gore was a serial exaggerator at best and, more likely, a pathological liar. He would say anything to be elected, he would lie about his upbringing, his sister's death, everything he said was suspect. Meanwhile, Bush was given the kid glove treatment, how could the press not find out about a DUI until the weekend before the election and even then (EVEN THEN!) they soft pedaled, "he was driving too slowly" said (i.e. lied) Karen Hughes. The fact that he had earlier lied about ever being arrested to a reporter, but who cares, not the press! And do not get me started on Bush's service record with the National Guard, how could the national press not take that story apart during the 2000 campaign, INCONCEIVABLE!
Anyway, as I await wide release of "An Inconvenient Truth," I still wonder how the most environmentally conscious presidential candidate ever was undone, in part, by the Green Party. Obviously, there is no simple answer as to why Gore did not do better in 2000 (and I do not want to get into a detailed criticism of Gore's campaign strategy or a meditation on the role that Clinton and Lewinsky played or start another pointless thread about Nader) but the crux of the problem was that the media was grossly and pervasively biased and dishonest and they still have not faced up to that fact. If you do not read the Daily Howler and are not versed in the full extent of media duplicity in the 2000 campaign, or perhaps you have just forgotten how bad it was, I urge you to check out the Howler this week and prepare to be appalled. I am not sure how best to combat the media monster, personally since 2000 I get most of my news off the web and since 2001 I've done little TV watching but enough to know that it remains an inexorable force, but I do believe that if the press has been captured by the interests of big money then we are all in very deep trouble. I worry that I sound like a reverse of those conservatives who branded the press as diabolically liberal, but as Colbert so eloquently put it "reality has a liberal bias" and I think the facts of the 2000 campaign are crystal clear, which is why the denial of the press to own up to their complicity is so infuriating. In any case, we must not fall for the `script' the press decides to write because it sounds good, the press will try to force feed it to the people and heaven help us if we swallow it again.