-Caveat Lector-
Al Gore is a liar? That's not true
Vice president's misstatements are minor - the media has committed
the real transgressions
Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Al Gore talks to supporters
in Milwaukee last week.
By David Neiwert
MSNBC CONTRIBUTOR
Oct. 16 - Al Gore is a liar, and George Bush is dumb: That seems to be the
rap on the two men running for the presidency according to the national
press. Bush demonstrated in the first two debates that the legend of his
stupidity is nonsense, despite a couple of stumbles. Contrarily, at the
Boston debate Al Gore seemed to provide grist for the mill of stories about
his "truthfulness." But that charge, too, is mostly a myth - as are many of
Gore's alleged lies.
This "lying" is supposed to represent a deep-seated problem...of the vice
president's - as though journalists and TV talking heads had suddenly
sprouted psychology degrees on their r�sum�s.
THE "GORE IS A LIAR" tale is widely presented to the public as a
reminder that personal character remains an issue for many voters. This
"lying" is supposed to represent a deep-seated problem, possibly a
psychological malfunction, of the vice president's - as though journalists
and TV talking heads had suddenly sprouted psychology degrees on their
r�sum�s.
But what the case represents is actually a breakdown in basic
standards of journalism - simple factual accuracy - on a massive scale.
Nearly the entire array of supposed "lies" uttered by Gore are gross
distortions of what the vice president actually uttered. Almost all of these
statements are partisan renderings of otherwise innocent remarks, and
calling them "lies" or "fabrications" is at best a gross overstatement:
Gore claims he "invented the Internet." Actually, Gore never said this.
What he said, during a CNN interview with Wolf Blitzer on March 9, 1999, was
this: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the
initiative in creating the Internet." This is a clumsy rendition of a
factual event: Gore was a key player in Congress in moving the network that
became the Internet from the realm of the military and academia, where it
originally was devised, and into the public realm, where it became the mass
phenomenon it is today.
October 11, 2000
Candidates Al Gore and George Bush respond to question on charges that Bush'
s campaign called Gore a 'serial exaggerator' and Gore's campaign called
Bush a 'bungler'.
Vincent Cerf, the man widely credited as the actual "father of the
Internet," argues that Gore should get a great deal of credit for playing a
seminal role in creating the legal foundation for the Internet. And even
former House Speaker Newt Gingrich - no ally of the vice president - agrees:
"Gore is not the father of the Internet, but in all fairness Gore is the
person who, in the Congress, most systematically worked to make sure that we
got to an Internet," he recently told a Washington gathering.
SAYING SORRY ON 'LOVE STORY'
Gore claims he was the role model for "Love Story." This tale originated
with a 1997 story in the Nashville Tennessean in an interview with the book'
s author, Erich Segal. The reporter wrote that Segal indicated that Gore and
his wife, Tipper, were the role models for the book's main characters. Then,
in December 1997, in a light, late-night conversation about favorite movies
with a pair of reporters from Time magazine and The New York Times, Gore
briefly mentioned the story, accurately, as a humorous aside.
Later, after the tale had blown up and was distorted into one of
Gore's "fabrications," the Times contacted Segal, and he told them the
Tennessean was wrong: Gore in fact was one of the models for the Oliver
Barrett character - along with the politician's roommate, actor Tommy Lee
Jones - but Tipper had nothing to do with it. Nonetheless, despite the Times
' correction and the insistence of the original Time reporter, Karen
Tumulty, that the remark wasn't a boast of any sort, and was factually
correct - "He said, 'All I know is that's what he [Segal] told reporters in
Tennessee' " - the fabricated "fabrication" remains a standard of TV and
newspaper pundits.
Gore was never a farm boy - he grew up in a posh Washington hotel. A number
of critics, both in print and on TV, have castigated Gore for making remarks
on the stump about the chores he performed on his family farm in Tennessee.
They point to Gore's youth as a senator's son, his attendance at a private
school and his residence at a Washington hotel. But that's only a
half-truth; though his school years were spent in D.C., Gore spent his
summers working on his parents' farm in Carthage, Tenn. Every biographer of
Gore - including those critical of the presidential candidate, such as Bob
Zelnick - has reported that the vice president performed strenuous daily
chores every summer of his youth. And the summers on the farm have likewise
been detailed in a number of in-depth Gore profiles in The Washington Post,
The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and Vanity Fair.
George Bush is dumb? That's stupid
Gore claims to have brought the Love Canal issue to national attention.
This legend began with a gross misquote that appeared simultaneously in The
New York Times and The Washington Post; the papers reported that Gore told a
group of students he discovered the Love Canal toxic waste dump as an issue,
adding: "I was the one that started it all." In fact, Gore didn't claim he
discovered the Love Canal issue; he said instead the problems at the canal
had supplemented his crusade against toxic wastes. He was inspired by an
incident in Toone, Tenn., after a teenager there wrote a letter alerting him
to problems in the southern town.
"I called for a congressional investigation and a hearing. I looked
around the country for other sites like that. I found a little place in
upstate New York called Love Canal. Had the first hearing on that issue and
Toone, Tennessee - that was the one that you didn't hear of. But that was
the one that started it all," Gore told the students, according to a video
tape of the event.
Clearly, Gore hadn't said, "I was the one that started it all." And
the "one" that started it all was Toone, not Love Canal. What Gore was
describing was factually correct in every respect. He wrote about it in
detail in his 1992 book, "Earth in the Balance," and his role as a prime
mover in creating the toxic-waste cleanup Superfund has been amply
documented by his biographers, including Zelnick. Both the Times and the
Post ran corrections. But that fact has escaped the numerous pundits and
partisans who bandy about the phrase "Love Canal" as yet another sound bite
implying that Gore is a liar.
DEBATE DISSEMBLING?
After the first debate between the candidates in Boston on Oct. 3 two
points raised by Gore caught the press' attention:
Gore mentioned the case of a young student in Florida forced to stand in
her class because of overcrowding at the school. Gore relied on an outdated
news account. But in the interim the girl had managed to get a seat at a
desk. Officials at the school leapt to their own defense and branded Gore a
liar, with those accounts receiving wide play. Receiving lesser play was the
fact that the newspaper that provided the original account re-examined the
case and found the basic facts of Gore's story intact: The school remained
overcrowded, and several students had in fact been forced to stand for
several weeks when school opened.
Gore mentioned he visited Texas with FEMA director James Witt in the wake
of a series of disastrous fires. It turned out that, though Gore had made
dozens of trips with Witt to various disaster scenes, Witt hadn't been along
on the trip Gore mentioned. Gore apologized for the mistake the next day.
But again, pundits pointed to the misstep as further proof of Gore's
dishonesty.
HOW LEGENDS GROW
These myths don't originate by osmosis or accident. In fact, nearly
all of them can be directly traced to the Republican National Committee,
which has developed a zeal for faxing attacks on Gore's credibility as part
of a general strategy to attach him in voters' minds to a Clinton
administration the GOP regularly portrays as "corrupt."
The independence and veracity of the press has been called into
question increasingly in the past decade. Cries against a perceived "liberal
media bias" - some of them well-grounded, some of them mere partisan
ax-grinding based on skewed data - were heard loudly in the early 1990s and
continue today.
Get political
Discuss the campaign
. Decision 2000 BBS
But in the past couple of years, the tide seems to have reversed
itself. Of particular note was a survey by the Pew Research Center for the
People and the Press analyzing press coverage of the presidential race
between April and June 2000. It found that 76 percent of the coverage of
Gore focused on two negative themes: his "lies" and exaggerations and his
alleged fund-raising scandals. Meanwhile, the survey found, coverage of
George W. Bush largely involved warm accounts of "compassionate
conservatism" and Bush's purported move to the political center.
The evidence suggests that many newsrooms have responded to the charges of
a "liberal" bias by instituting a de facto conservative bias.
The evidence suggests that many newsrooms have responded to the
charges of a "liberal" bias by instituting a de facto conservative bias. But
the problem with either bias is that it overlooks factuality - the basis of
all credible journalism - in the pursuit of partisan agendas. Stories become
highly selective prosecutions instead of thorough and balanced news
accounts.
If the press is serious about responding to a rising tide of reader
and audience surveys indicating a steadily eroding trust in the value of
their work, it needs to begin by making factual accuracy and basic balance
and fairness its hallmarks and not mere afterthoughts. And it wouldn't hurt
if it dropped the half-baked armchair psychoanalysis from its repertoire,
either.
David Neiwert is a freelance writer based in Seattle and the author
of "In God's Country: The Patriot Movement and the Pacific Northwest."
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