Al Gore is a liar? That’s not true
 
                         The Vice president’s misstatements are minor
                          — the media has committed the real transgressions

                         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.”

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