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.
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
résumés.
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’.
Vinton 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.
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 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.”