G
Gandalf Grey
Guest
The media's assault on reason
By Eric Boehlert
Created Jun 13 2007 - 9:17am
How hard is it to figure out if a book has footnotes? When it comes to Al
Gore's new, national bestseller, The Assault on Reason [0] (Penguin Press,
May 2007), it's trickier than you think for some disdainful members of the
Beltway press corps.
On June 10, The Washington Post published an opinion column [0] by Andrew
Ferguson about Gore's new book. Personally, I give The Assault on Reason
high marks as a spot-on, truth-telling critique of the Bush administration,
as well as for the insightful concern Gore expresses about the fragile state
of American democracy. Or, "what passes for a national conversation," as
Gore puts it.
Not surprisingly though, Ferguson, an editor at the Rupert Murdoch-owned
Weekly Standard, disliked the book, waving it off as "a sprawling, untidy
blast of indignation."
What was embarrassing for both Ferguson and the Post was that in the very
first sentence of his column, Ferguson made a whopping error when he
condescendingly observed that The Assault on Reason had no footnotes. (The
book is such a mess, footnotes would have been of no use, he suggested.) The
problem, according to Ferguson, is that without footnotes readers have no
way of checking the sources for the many historical quotes Gore uses in the
book, including one on Page 88 from Abraham Lincoln that Ferguson would
"love to know where [Gore] found."
In fact, if Ferguson had simply bothered to look, every one of the nearly
300 quotes found in The Assault on Reason is accompanied by an endnote with
complete sourcing information, including the quote on Page 88 that Ferguson
focuses on. The endnotes consume 20 pages of the book.
But such is life for Al Gore when dealing with the Beltway press, where his
vociferous critics cannot be bothered with the simplest fact-checking task,
while oblivious media outlets such as the Post print up the errors.
Of course the thick irony here is that Gore's book laments the state of our
crumbling national dialogue, yet it's the press that often deliberately
dumbs down and interrupts our "conversation of democracy." Gore doesn't
often explicitly connect the dots in his book, but the press remains a
culprit throughout.
For instance, Gore writes extensively about the culture of fear that
developed following the terrorist attacks on 9-11:
The single most surprising new element in America's national conversation
is the prominence and intensity of constant fear. Moreover, there is an
uncharacteristic and persistent confusion about the sources of that fear; we
seem to be having unusual difficulty in distinguishing between illusory
threats and legitimate ones.
The sad fact is that the media have played a central role. Everyone remember
the Great Duct Tape Scare [0] of 2003?
Gore also decries the fact that the Bush administration misled Americans
about Saddam Hussein's alleged stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. But
the White House had lots of help in spreading that phony prewar tale,
including The New York Times' Judith Miller to the whole Fox News team, to
name just a few.
Gore does offer a specific critique of television and blames it for
polluting the national conversation. Too much Anna Nicole Smith and Britney,
says Gore. And of course he's right. The cable news nervous breakdown that
was broadcast last Friday afternoon when Paris Hilton was taken back to jail
simply proved Gore's point, and specifically that it's
journalists who are driving the celebrity-as-news obsession, not news
consumers. (MSNBC producers were heard screaming when Hilton first emerged
from her home in handcuffs on Friday.) In the 24 hours after Friday's news
broke, "Paris" was mentioned nearly 800 times on CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC,
combined. That same day, Gen. Peter Pace, who oversees the war in Iraq,
resigned as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. His name was mentioned
fewer than 100 times by the three cable news channels, according to
TVEyes.com.
But the problems extend far beyond celebrity-obsessed cable news channels.
Proof of the broken system? Just look at the Beltway media's reaction to
Gore's book release. Thanks to the likes of ABC News, The New York Times,
and The Washington Post, the coverage has, at times, been comically shallow,
small, and dishonest. That's what's wrong with our "national conversation."
And Gore has the 2000 campaign scars [0] to prove it, having suffered [0]
some of the most egregious media cheap shots [0] in modern political
history. (Inventing the internet, anybody?) Indeed, it's no exaggeration to
say Gore is out on book tours today instead of sitting in the Oval Office
because of the wildly dishonest press coverage he received during that
presidential campaign, in which he was depicted as a stiff, phony bore who
lied.
That lazy narrative still sticks to this day. Time magazine, in an otherwise
flattering profile, recently wrote of Gore, "He was never quite the wooden
Indian his detractors made him out to be in 2000 (nor did he claim to have
invented the Internet), but he did carry himself with a slightly
anachronistic Southern formality that was magnified beneath the klieg lights
of the campaign."
See, it was the klieg lights that doomed Gore in 2000, not the dishonest
journalists, who actually doubled as the unnamed "detractors" referenced by
Time.
And in a recent New York Times Magazine profile, James Traub wrote that in
2000 Gore "was, to all appearances, an unhappy guy running against a happy
guy; and Americans like their presidential candidates to be happy." Unhappy?
Of course, when Gore lip-locked his wife on national television at the
Democratic convention in an unexpected display of unbridled joy, the pundits
descended to [0] probe and dissect the smooch, before dismissing it as a
likely calculated ruse.
It seems Gore has been cursed with the life sentence of suffering newsroom
fools gladly. Indeed, much of the Beltway media's response to The Assault on
Reason was depressingly predictable and dim-witted. As Bob Somerby noted [0]
at his weblog, The Daily Howler, "It's obvious how it's going to go as the
press corps pretends to discuss Al Gore's book. Gore has said our discourse
is broken -- and our pundits are going to rush out to prove it."
Appearing on ABC's Good Morning America, Gore was forced to suffer through
an extended sit-down with host Diane Sawyer, who, like so many of Gore's
recent interviewers, appeared only interested in talking about whatever
presidential aspiration he may or may not have. First question: "OK. You're
not gonna tell me again that you have no plans to run, are you? Tell me this
morning." (FYI, it's telling that during an hour-long conference call [0]
with prominent liberal bloggers during his book tour, not once was Gore
asked about his White House hopes. Instead, the bloggers actually engaged
Gore on the substance of his book, as well as the day's current events. How
quaint.)
Later, Sawyer, reciting GOP talking points regarding anyone who questions
the failed war in Iraq, tried to set a word-game trap for Gore:
SAWYER: And another point you say, "If Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11,
the president took us into a war he didn't have to. Three thousand Americans
and countless Iraqis died unnecessarily." Are you saying, in this book and
this morning, that Americans -- 3,000 of them -- died unnecessarily?
GORE: See, that's the kind of buzzword approach: "Is it an unnecessary
death?" No. Those who serve our country are honored in memory and those who
are still serving are always honored. That's not the question. There is
hardly anybody in America left, Diane, who doesn't believe that it was a
terrible mistake to invade a country that didn't attack us.
And then there was this dopey back-and-forth between Gore and Nightline's
Terry Moran, who really has no idea how modern politics works in America; an
awkward fact Gore was forced to (politely) highlight:
MORAN: So, if this fall, a sufficient number of Democrats came to you and
said, "This is your moment. We needyou. The country needs you."
GORE: Well, I'm not -- I -- it doesn't happen that way anymore.
MORAN: It has.
GORE: You know, 100 years ago, there were times when something like that
happened. It hasn't happened in, in the last century or so, and that's just
not the way our political system works now.
At another point, Moran, who like so many journalists was determined to
portray The Assault on Reason as a bitter, anti-Bush screed, asked Gore if
it was "the book you wanted to write after the 2000 election?" (i.e.
payback). But how on Earth could Gore have wanted to write this book right
after 2000 if most of the events discussed in the book (the war with Iraq,
the abuses at Abu Ghraib, corporate tax cuts, etc.) hadn't even occurred
yet?
Meanwhile, over at ABC.com, Jake Tapper analyzed [0] The Assault on Reason.
Busy portraying Gore as a Michael Moore-type radical (as if Moore's ideas
are radical), Tapper theorized that, although there is no mention of it in
the book, Gore would probably support impeaching Bush and Vice President
Dick Cheney. Gore, in fact, does not support impeachment, which, of course,
is why Gore did not write about impeaching Bush or Cheney in his book.
Bottom line: Gore was trying to have a debate about democracy while Sawyer,
Moran, and Tapper were inserting words into his mouth, asking silly
questions, and analyzing what he did not write in his book. And that was
just ABC News.
At The New York Times, conservative columnist David Brooks ridiculed [0]
Gore for writing a book that Gore did not actually write. Brooks described
Gore's utopia as a machine-driven world that is without emotion, family or
friends: "He envisions a sort of Vulcan Utopia, in which dispassionate
individuals exchange facts and arrive at logical conclusions." Suffice it to
say that Brook's mocking description bears no resemblance to The Assault on
Reason. Then again, Brooks has been making stuff up about Gore for years, so
why stop now?
The same goes for his colleague Maureen Dowd. Like clockwork, she typed up a
derisive, trivia-based column [0] to greet Gore's new book. Believe it or
not, she thought the most telling facts about The Assault on Reason were
that A) Gore's image does not appear on the cover; and B) Gore's author
photo on the jacket dates from the 1990s. And neither reflected well on
Gore. According to Dowd, the lack of photo on the cover revealed Gore's
pretensions about the book, while his dated author photo revealed his
vanity. (Ridiculing The Assault on Reason in the Sunday Times of London,
Andrew Sullivan also stressed very high up in his review that Gore's face
does not appear on the book cover. Sullivan and Dowd literally critiqued
packaging.)
Meanwhile, The Washington Post, embracing rampant anti-intellectualism,
fretted that Gore was too smart. (Or he was acting too smart.) And the paper
despised him for it. Reviewing The Assault on Reason for the Post on May 30,
Alan Ehrenhalt, whom the Post described as an "intellectual," leveled a
personal attack on Gore in the review's second sentence, complaining that he
"annoy the maximum possible number of people." (Ehrenhalt offered no
proof for that attack.)
He belittled Gore for including too many quotes from the likes of Louis
Brandeis, Edmund Burke, Aristotle, Thomas Jefferson, John Donne, and the
German philosopher Jurgen Habermas. (All the quotes showed that Gore was
"desperate to display his erudition.") Ehrenhalt then concluded by noting,
"The Assault on Reason is a serious work by an intelligent man with an
incurable habit of calling more attention to himself than to the ideas he
wishes to communicate."
So Gore was guilty of "calling attention to himself" by not putting his
image on the cover of the book and by filling The Assault on Reason with
quotes from other people? You figure it out, because it makes no sense to
me.
Three days later, while covering a local speech and book signing, the Post's
Dana Milbank literally made fun of Gore for even discussing topics of
historical importance, such as the Enlightenment and the Information Age.
Milbank wrote that "Professor Gore" kept pompously reminding attendees that
he was "the smartest guy in the room." Yet Milbank's mocking article
provided no proof to back up that assertion. Instead, the article included
quotes from people in the audience who said Gore was the smartest person in
the room.
In The Assault on Reason, Gore correctly laments that we cannot have
intelligent, informed national debates. Yet the sad fact remains there are
Beltway press players who devote much of their time and energy to ensuring
that those debates cannot take place. Hopefully Gore will write a book about
them some day.
_______
About author A senior fellow at Media Matters for America, and a former
senior writer for Salon, Boehlert's first book, "Lapdogs: How The Press
Rolled Over for Bush," was published in May. He can be reached at
eboehlert@aol.com [1]
--
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
available to advance understanding of
political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson
By Eric Boehlert
Created Jun 13 2007 - 9:17am
How hard is it to figure out if a book has footnotes? When it comes to Al
Gore's new, national bestseller, The Assault on Reason [0] (Penguin Press,
May 2007), it's trickier than you think for some disdainful members of the
Beltway press corps.
On June 10, The Washington Post published an opinion column [0] by Andrew
Ferguson about Gore's new book. Personally, I give The Assault on Reason
high marks as a spot-on, truth-telling critique of the Bush administration,
as well as for the insightful concern Gore expresses about the fragile state
of American democracy. Or, "what passes for a national conversation," as
Gore puts it.
Not surprisingly though, Ferguson, an editor at the Rupert Murdoch-owned
Weekly Standard, disliked the book, waving it off as "a sprawling, untidy
blast of indignation."
What was embarrassing for both Ferguson and the Post was that in the very
first sentence of his column, Ferguson made a whopping error when he
condescendingly observed that The Assault on Reason had no footnotes. (The
book is such a mess, footnotes would have been of no use, he suggested.) The
problem, according to Ferguson, is that without footnotes readers have no
way of checking the sources for the many historical quotes Gore uses in the
book, including one on Page 88 from Abraham Lincoln that Ferguson would
"love to know where [Gore] found."
In fact, if Ferguson had simply bothered to look, every one of the nearly
300 quotes found in The Assault on Reason is accompanied by an endnote with
complete sourcing information, including the quote on Page 88 that Ferguson
focuses on. The endnotes consume 20 pages of the book.
But such is life for Al Gore when dealing with the Beltway press, where his
vociferous critics cannot be bothered with the simplest fact-checking task,
while oblivious media outlets such as the Post print up the errors.
Of course the thick irony here is that Gore's book laments the state of our
crumbling national dialogue, yet it's the press that often deliberately
dumbs down and interrupts our "conversation of democracy." Gore doesn't
often explicitly connect the dots in his book, but the press remains a
culprit throughout.
For instance, Gore writes extensively about the culture of fear that
developed following the terrorist attacks on 9-11:
The single most surprising new element in America's national conversation
is the prominence and intensity of constant fear. Moreover, there is an
uncharacteristic and persistent confusion about the sources of that fear; we
seem to be having unusual difficulty in distinguishing between illusory
threats and legitimate ones.
The sad fact is that the media have played a central role. Everyone remember
the Great Duct Tape Scare [0] of 2003?
Gore also decries the fact that the Bush administration misled Americans
about Saddam Hussein's alleged stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. But
the White House had lots of help in spreading that phony prewar tale,
including The New York Times' Judith Miller to the whole Fox News team, to
name just a few.
Gore does offer a specific critique of television and blames it for
polluting the national conversation. Too much Anna Nicole Smith and Britney,
says Gore. And of course he's right. The cable news nervous breakdown that
was broadcast last Friday afternoon when Paris Hilton was taken back to jail
simply proved Gore's point, and specifically that it's
journalists who are driving the celebrity-as-news obsession, not news
consumers. (MSNBC producers were heard screaming when Hilton first emerged
from her home in handcuffs on Friday.) In the 24 hours after Friday's news
broke, "Paris" was mentioned nearly 800 times on CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC,
combined. That same day, Gen. Peter Pace, who oversees the war in Iraq,
resigned as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. His name was mentioned
fewer than 100 times by the three cable news channels, according to
TVEyes.com.
But the problems extend far beyond celebrity-obsessed cable news channels.
Proof of the broken system? Just look at the Beltway media's reaction to
Gore's book release. Thanks to the likes of ABC News, The New York Times,
and The Washington Post, the coverage has, at times, been comically shallow,
small, and dishonest. That's what's wrong with our "national conversation."
And Gore has the 2000 campaign scars [0] to prove it, having suffered [0]
some of the most egregious media cheap shots [0] in modern political
history. (Inventing the internet, anybody?) Indeed, it's no exaggeration to
say Gore is out on book tours today instead of sitting in the Oval Office
because of the wildly dishonest press coverage he received during that
presidential campaign, in which he was depicted as a stiff, phony bore who
lied.
That lazy narrative still sticks to this day. Time magazine, in an otherwise
flattering profile, recently wrote of Gore, "He was never quite the wooden
Indian his detractors made him out to be in 2000 (nor did he claim to have
invented the Internet), but he did carry himself with a slightly
anachronistic Southern formality that was magnified beneath the klieg lights
of the campaign."
See, it was the klieg lights that doomed Gore in 2000, not the dishonest
journalists, who actually doubled as the unnamed "detractors" referenced by
Time.
And in a recent New York Times Magazine profile, James Traub wrote that in
2000 Gore "was, to all appearances, an unhappy guy running against a happy
guy; and Americans like their presidential candidates to be happy." Unhappy?
Of course, when Gore lip-locked his wife on national television at the
Democratic convention in an unexpected display of unbridled joy, the pundits
descended to [0] probe and dissect the smooch, before dismissing it as a
likely calculated ruse.
It seems Gore has been cursed with the life sentence of suffering newsroom
fools gladly. Indeed, much of the Beltway media's response to The Assault on
Reason was depressingly predictable and dim-witted. As Bob Somerby noted [0]
at his weblog, The Daily Howler, "It's obvious how it's going to go as the
press corps pretends to discuss Al Gore's book. Gore has said our discourse
is broken -- and our pundits are going to rush out to prove it."
Appearing on ABC's Good Morning America, Gore was forced to suffer through
an extended sit-down with host Diane Sawyer, who, like so many of Gore's
recent interviewers, appeared only interested in talking about whatever
presidential aspiration he may or may not have. First question: "OK. You're
not gonna tell me again that you have no plans to run, are you? Tell me this
morning." (FYI, it's telling that during an hour-long conference call [0]
with prominent liberal bloggers during his book tour, not once was Gore
asked about his White House hopes. Instead, the bloggers actually engaged
Gore on the substance of his book, as well as the day's current events. How
quaint.)
Later, Sawyer, reciting GOP talking points regarding anyone who questions
the failed war in Iraq, tried to set a word-game trap for Gore:
SAWYER: And another point you say, "If Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11,
the president took us into a war he didn't have to. Three thousand Americans
and countless Iraqis died unnecessarily." Are you saying, in this book and
this morning, that Americans -- 3,000 of them -- died unnecessarily?
GORE: See, that's the kind of buzzword approach: "Is it an unnecessary
death?" No. Those who serve our country are honored in memory and those who
are still serving are always honored. That's not the question. There is
hardly anybody in America left, Diane, who doesn't believe that it was a
terrible mistake to invade a country that didn't attack us.
And then there was this dopey back-and-forth between Gore and Nightline's
Terry Moran, who really has no idea how modern politics works in America; an
awkward fact Gore was forced to (politely) highlight:
MORAN: So, if this fall, a sufficient number of Democrats came to you and
said, "This is your moment. We needyou. The country needs you."
GORE: Well, I'm not -- I -- it doesn't happen that way anymore.
MORAN: It has.
GORE: You know, 100 years ago, there were times when something like that
happened. It hasn't happened in, in the last century or so, and that's just
not the way our political system works now.
At another point, Moran, who like so many journalists was determined to
portray The Assault on Reason as a bitter, anti-Bush screed, asked Gore if
it was "the book you wanted to write after the 2000 election?" (i.e.
payback). But how on Earth could Gore have wanted to write this book right
after 2000 if most of the events discussed in the book (the war with Iraq,
the abuses at Abu Ghraib, corporate tax cuts, etc.) hadn't even occurred
yet?
Meanwhile, over at ABC.com, Jake Tapper analyzed [0] The Assault on Reason.
Busy portraying Gore as a Michael Moore-type radical (as if Moore's ideas
are radical), Tapper theorized that, although there is no mention of it in
the book, Gore would probably support impeaching Bush and Vice President
Dick Cheney. Gore, in fact, does not support impeachment, which, of course,
is why Gore did not write about impeaching Bush or Cheney in his book.
Bottom line: Gore was trying to have a debate about democracy while Sawyer,
Moran, and Tapper were inserting words into his mouth, asking silly
questions, and analyzing what he did not write in his book. And that was
just ABC News.
At The New York Times, conservative columnist David Brooks ridiculed [0]
Gore for writing a book that Gore did not actually write. Brooks described
Gore's utopia as a machine-driven world that is without emotion, family or
friends: "He envisions a sort of Vulcan Utopia, in which dispassionate
individuals exchange facts and arrive at logical conclusions." Suffice it to
say that Brook's mocking description bears no resemblance to The Assault on
Reason. Then again, Brooks has been making stuff up about Gore for years, so
why stop now?
The same goes for his colleague Maureen Dowd. Like clockwork, she typed up a
derisive, trivia-based column [0] to greet Gore's new book. Believe it or
not, she thought the most telling facts about The Assault on Reason were
that A) Gore's image does not appear on the cover; and B) Gore's author
photo on the jacket dates from the 1990s. And neither reflected well on
Gore. According to Dowd, the lack of photo on the cover revealed Gore's
pretensions about the book, while his dated author photo revealed his
vanity. (Ridiculing The Assault on Reason in the Sunday Times of London,
Andrew Sullivan also stressed very high up in his review that Gore's face
does not appear on the book cover. Sullivan and Dowd literally critiqued
packaging.)
Meanwhile, The Washington Post, embracing rampant anti-intellectualism,
fretted that Gore was too smart. (Or he was acting too smart.) And the paper
despised him for it. Reviewing The Assault on Reason for the Post on May 30,
Alan Ehrenhalt, whom the Post described as an "intellectual," leveled a
personal attack on Gore in the review's second sentence, complaining that he
"annoy
proof for that attack.)
He belittled Gore for including too many quotes from the likes of Louis
Brandeis, Edmund Burke, Aristotle, Thomas Jefferson, John Donne, and the
German philosopher Jurgen Habermas. (All the quotes showed that Gore was
"desperate to display his erudition.") Ehrenhalt then concluded by noting,
"The Assault on Reason is a serious work by an intelligent man with an
incurable habit of calling more attention to himself than to the ideas he
wishes to communicate."
So Gore was guilty of "calling attention to himself" by not putting his
image on the cover of the book and by filling The Assault on Reason with
quotes from other people? You figure it out, because it makes no sense to
me.
Three days later, while covering a local speech and book signing, the Post's
Dana Milbank literally made fun of Gore for even discussing topics of
historical importance, such as the Enlightenment and the Information Age.
Milbank wrote that "Professor Gore" kept pompously reminding attendees that
he was "the smartest guy in the room." Yet Milbank's mocking article
provided no proof to back up that assertion. Instead, the article included
quotes from people in the audience who said Gore was the smartest person in
the room.
In The Assault on Reason, Gore correctly laments that we cannot have
intelligent, informed national debates. Yet the sad fact remains there are
Beltway press players who devote much of their time and energy to ensuring
that those debates cannot take place. Hopefully Gore will write a book about
them some day.
_______
About author A senior fellow at Media Matters for America, and a former
senior writer for Salon, Boehlert's first book, "Lapdogs: How The Press
Rolled Over for Bush," was published in May. He can be reached at
eboehlert@aol.com [1]
--
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
available to advance understanding of
political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson