More on Vanity Fair on Gore

There are a couple more passages worth highlighting from Evgenia Peretz’s fine Vanity Fair article about the War on Gore. First, some of you may have seen this quote, but the wider the circulation the better. If you don’t believe me that 2000 campaign coverage was scandalously lazy, shallow, and partial, just ask ubiquitous tee vee and print presence Margaret Carlson:

Perhaps reporting in this vein was just too gratifying to the press for it to stop. As Time magazine’s Margaret Carlson admitted to Don Imus at the time, “You can actually disprove some of what Bush is saying if you really get into the weeds and get out your calculator, or look at his record in Texas. But it’s really easy, and it’s fun to disprove Al Gore. As sport, and as our enterprise, Gore coming up with another whopper is greatly entertaining to us.”

And it’s been just as fun for the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, let me tell you! However, that last sentence should read “people like me making up another Gore whopper out of whole cloth is greatly entertaining to us.” This, from Chris Matthews, is just as instructive:

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.”

The boldfaced projection is a remarkably precise inversion of reality. Viewers who watched the debate thought Gore had won. It was the commentators, and people who got their debate information mediated through them, who preferred Bush. It was the commentators who decided that Gore’s sighing was more important than Bush telling baldfaced lies about his reactionary policy proposals. Peretz, moreover, explains where this narrative originated: “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.”

What’s important to remember, however, is that wherever the sighing nonsense originated, the blame rests entirely with the ostensible journalists who ran with it. One can hardly blame GOP operatives or conservative media hacks for trying to focus on trivia after a debate in which their candidate has been substantively obliterated; that’s their job. But for reporters for major newspapers to go along is unforgivable.