Going After Gore

by tristero

I urge everyone to read Going After Gore by Evgenia Peretz in Vanity Fair. It’s as good as Somerby says it is. And for those you who are just coming of political age now and weren’t aware of 2000, you will surely recognize that what the press is doing now – obsessing over Democrats’ haircuts while admiring the handsome presidential mien of the Republicans – was done back then. To catastrophic result. Here’s one part that really struck me as an example of exactly how low is the character of the reporters who trashed Gore:

[Ceci] Connolly, too, at The Washington Post, wrote about Gore’s “grubbing for dollars inside a monastery,” and “stretching the [fund-raising] rules as far as he can.” Her stories about the distortions extended the life of the distortions themselves. In one article, she knocked Gore for “the hullabaloo over the Internet—from [his] inflated claim to his slowness to tamp out the publicity brush fire.” In another, co-written with David Von Drehle, she claimed, “From conservative talk radio titan Rush Limbaugh and the New York Post (headline: ‘Liar, Liar’) to neutral papers across the country, the attack on Gore’s credibility is resonating.”

…Gore staffers came to feel that if Connolly was denied the access or information she wanted there would be a price to pay in terms of her coverage. In one of her pieces Carter Eskew, a former tobacco-industry adviser, was described in a quote as being “single-handedly accountable for addicting another whole generation of American kids” to smoking. When asked about the article, Eskew recalls how Connolly had called him the day before for a comment about an environmental group’s endorsement of Bill Bradley. After he gave her something perfunctory, he says, she went after him. “She goes, ‘That’s all you’re going to say?'” recalls Eskew. “And I said, ‘Yeah, that’s all we’re going to say.’ And she goes, ‘Do you know how stupid that is, Carter?’ And then she threatened me, ‘Well, if that’s the kind of relationship you want to have with me, then you’ll find out the kind of relationship we’re going to have’—something to that effect.” (“I never threatened Carter Eskew,” says Connolly. “It’s possible I pressed him for something more than a ‘perfunctory’ answer.… It’s odd that he would think my story was journalistically out of bounds or retribution for something as trivial as a mediocre quote.”)

It’s not odd at all, Ceci. That’s how you behave.

I was a bit puzzled by the ending of the piece:

The pundits, however, invariably come around to the same question: “But if he ran, would he revert to the ‘old Gore’?” Another question—in light of countless recent stories about John Edwards’s haircut—might be: Would the media revert to the old media?

Clearly what Peretz meant was

The pundits, however, invariably come around to the same question: “But if he ran, would he revert to the ‘old Gore’?” The real question—in light of countless recent stories about John Edwards’s haircut— should be: When will the American media stop trivializing and distorting the real issues at play in national elections?

Alas, we know the answer to that one. But I’m not sure they can get away with the same level of unspeakable viciousness. First of all, there’s the reality of the Bush administration. And there are the blogs, which are not unread by the media. We would demand her guts on a stick, to quote the inimitable Mel Gibson, if Maureen Dowd described the next Democratic presidential nominee in the way she did Gore, as “practically lactating.”

Then again, she is one very sick soul in a very sick miliieu.