Gore's TV War

I'll say this about algore version 3.0, he is certainly more entertaining than the old, "new Al Gore".

I saw him on Letterman the other night and he was actually funny. In a first for me, he came off as a real human being; poking fun at himself, laughing. He even appeared to be sincere, at least when he wasn't trying to be serious and talk about policy issues. I found myself liking him, thinking that if he could ever act that comfortable in his own skin and somehow expunge his horrible tendency to lecture everyone as if we were all slightly dim-witted 7 year olds, he could be a formidable candidate. (Hopefully it will never come to that, and if my feelings of affection for Al ever get too strong, I can always flip through his new pair of books at Barnes & Noble until I regain my senses.)

Anyway, Josh Benson has a great article on Gore in this week's NY Observer(Gore’s TV War: He Lobs Salvo At Fox News) . Gore evidently spent a lot of time on the phone with Benson and true to form, whenever Gore feels intellectually expansive in a non-scripted format, he came up with some really wacky stuff. Take this excerpt, for example:

Mr. Gore has a bone to pick with his critics: namely, he says, that a systematically orchestrated bias in the media makes it impossible for him and his fellow Democrats to get a fair shake. "Something will start at the Republican National Committee, inside the building, and it will explode the next day on the right-wing talk-show network and on Fox News and in the newspapers that play this game, The Washington Times and the others. And then they'll create a little echo chamber, and pretty soon they'll start baiting the mainstream media for allegedly ignoring the story they've pushed into the zeitgeist. And then pretty soon the mainstream media goes out and disingenuously takes a so-called objective sampling, and lo and behold, these R.N.C. talking points are woven into the fabric of the zeitgeist."

Gore's media analysis is fair enough, as far as it goes, though I wonder if the RNC really has folks that are on the ball enough to orchestrate anything. But granting that this happens, what does Al think goes on at the DNC with regard to the "mainstream" press? Is Howell Raines at the Times part of this vast right wing conspiracy? The original three networks? CNN?

What I find a little scary is that Gore (and other folks from the same ideological zip code) perceive the existence of debate and alternative points of view expressed in the broadcast media as being somehow unfair. Can he really be so blinkered that he genuinely believed that the traditional "mainstream" media are unbiased? That they didn't (for the most part) share his ideological perspective and therefore decide what was news and how to report it on that basis? I'm reminded of that famous (and undoubtedly apocryphal) story about the woman from Manhattan's Upper West Side (our version of Marin County) who "just knew" that the election had to have been stolen because she didn't know a single person who had voted for Bush.

Welcome to the marketplace of ideas, Al. You'd better get used to it 'cuz it ain't going to go away.