Post by JamesAquila on May 27, 2004 5:51:17 GMT -5
This is an except from David Brock's new book, The Republican Noise Machine. This passage talks about Gore and the 2000 election.
In the 2000 presidential campaign, the Republican Noise Machine, which worked for years to convince Americans that the Clintons were criminally minded, used the same techniques of character assassination to turn the Democratic standard-bearer, Al Gore, for many years seen as an overly earnest Boy Scout, into a liar. When Republican National Committee polling showed that the Republicans would lose the election to the Democrats on the issues, a "skillful and sustained 18-month campaign by Republicans to portray the vice president as flawed and untrustworthy" was adopted, the New York Times reported. Republicans accused Gore of saying things he never said -- most infamously, that he "invented" the Internet, a claim he never made that was first attributed to him in a GOP press release before it coursed through the media. Actually, Gore had said, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet," a claim that even former House Speaker Newt Gingrich verified as true.1
The right-wing media broadcast this attack and similar attacks relentlessly, in effect giving the GOP countless hours of free political advertising every day for months leading up to the election. "Albert Arnold Gore Jr. is a habitual liar," William Bennett, a Cabinet secretary in the Reagan and first Bush administrations, announced in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. "...Gore lies because he can’t help himself," neoconservative pamphleteer David Horowitz wrote. "liar, liar," screamed Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post. The conservative columnist George F. Will pointed to Gore’s "serial mendacity" and warned that he is a "dangerous man." "Gore may be quietly going nuts," National Review’s Byron York concluded. The Washington Times agreed: "The real question is how to react to Mr. Gore’s increasingly bizarre utterings. Webster’s New World Dictionary defines ‘delusion’ thusly: ‘The apparent perception, in a nervous or mental disorder, of some thing external that is not actually present...a belief in something that is contrary to fact or reality, resulting from deception, misconception, or a mental disorder.’"
This impugning of Gore’s character and the questioning of his mental fitness soon surfaced in the regular media. The New York Times ran an article headlined tendency to embellish fact snags gore, while the Boston Globe weighed in with Gore seen as "misleading." On ABC’s This Week, former Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos referred to Gore’s "Pinocchio problem." For National Journal’s Stuart Taylor, the issue was "the Clintonization of Al Gore, who increasingly apes his boss in fictionalizing his life story and mangling the truth for political gain." Washington Post editor Bob Woodward raised the question of whether Gore "could comprehend reality," while MSNBC’s Chris Matthews compared Gore to "Zelig" and insisted, "Isn’t it getting to be delusionary?"
The well-orchestrated media cacophony had its intended effect: The election was far more competitive than it should have been -- and, indeed, was decided before the Supreme Court stepped in -- because of negative voter perceptions of Gore’s honesty and trustworthiness. In the final polls before the election and in exit polls on Election Day, voters said they favored Gore’s program over George W. Bush’s. Gore won substantial majorities not only for his position on most specific issues but also for his overall thrust. The conservative Bush theme of tax cuts and small government was rejected by voters in favor of the more liberal Gore theme of extending prosperity more broadly and standing up to corporate interests. Yet while Bush shaded the truth and misstated facts throughout the campaign on everything from the size of Gore’s federal spending proposals to his own record as governor of Texas, by substantial margins voters thought Bush was more truthful than Gore. According to an ABC exit poll, of personal qualities that mattered most to voters, 24 percent ranked "honest/trustworthy" first -- and they went for Bush over Gore by a margin of 80 percent to 15 percent. Seventy-four percent of voters said "Gore would say anything," while 58 percent thought Bush would. Among white, college-educated, male voters, Gore’s "untruthfulness" was cited overwhelmingly as a reason not to vote for him, far more than any other reason.
Two years after the election, Gore gave an extraordinary interview to the New York Observer that could be read as an explanation of what happened to his presidential campaign. Gore charged that conservatives in the media, operating under journalistic cover, are loyal not to the standards and conventions of journalism but, rather, to politics and party. Gore said:
The media is kind of weird these days on politics, and there are some major institutional voices that are, truthfully speaking, part and parcel of the Republican Party. Fox News Network, the Washington Times, Rush Limbaugh -- there’s a bunch of them, and some of them are financed by wealthy ultra-conservative billionaires who make political deals with Republican administrations and the rest of the media.... Most of the media [has] been slow to recognize the pervasive impact of this Fifth Column in their ranks -- that is, day after day, injecting the daily Republican talking points into the definition of what’s objective as stated by the news media as a whole....
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 all 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 RNC talking points are woven into the fabric of the zeitgeist....
True to form, the right-wing media greeted this factual description with yet another frenzy of repetitive messaging portraying Gore as crazy. Speaking of Gore on FOX News, The Weekly Standard’s Fred Barnes said, "This is nutty. This is along the lines with, you know, President Bush killed Paul Wellstone, and the White House knew before 9/11 that the attacks were going to happen. This is -- I mean, this is conspiratorial stuff." Also on FOX, syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer said of Gore, "I’m a psychiatrist. I don’t usually practice on camera. But this is the edge of looniness, this idea that there’s a vast conspiracy, it sits in a building, it emanates, it has these tentacles, is really at the edge. He could use a little help." "It could be he’s just nuts," Rush Limbaugh said of Gore. "Tipper Gore’s issue is what? Mental health. Right? It could be closer to home than we know." "He [Gore] said it’s a conspiracy," Tucker Carlson said on CNN’s Crossfire. "I actually think he’s coming a little unhinged," The Weekly Standard’s David Brooks, now at the New York Times, said of Gore on PBS.
The rest of the introduction is available at Buzzflash.com:
www.buzzflash.com/contributors/04/05/con04218.html
In the 2000 presidential campaign, the Republican Noise Machine, which worked for years to convince Americans that the Clintons were criminally minded, used the same techniques of character assassination to turn the Democratic standard-bearer, Al Gore, for many years seen as an overly earnest Boy Scout, into a liar. When Republican National Committee polling showed that the Republicans would lose the election to the Democrats on the issues, a "skillful and sustained 18-month campaign by Republicans to portray the vice president as flawed and untrustworthy" was adopted, the New York Times reported. Republicans accused Gore of saying things he never said -- most infamously, that he "invented" the Internet, a claim he never made that was first attributed to him in a GOP press release before it coursed through the media. Actually, Gore had said, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet," a claim that even former House Speaker Newt Gingrich verified as true.1
The right-wing media broadcast this attack and similar attacks relentlessly, in effect giving the GOP countless hours of free political advertising every day for months leading up to the election. "Albert Arnold Gore Jr. is a habitual liar," William Bennett, a Cabinet secretary in the Reagan and first Bush administrations, announced in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. "...Gore lies because he can’t help himself," neoconservative pamphleteer David Horowitz wrote. "liar, liar," screamed Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post. The conservative columnist George F. Will pointed to Gore’s "serial mendacity" and warned that he is a "dangerous man." "Gore may be quietly going nuts," National Review’s Byron York concluded. The Washington Times agreed: "The real question is how to react to Mr. Gore’s increasingly bizarre utterings. Webster’s New World Dictionary defines ‘delusion’ thusly: ‘The apparent perception, in a nervous or mental disorder, of some thing external that is not actually present...a belief in something that is contrary to fact or reality, resulting from deception, misconception, or a mental disorder.’"
This impugning of Gore’s character and the questioning of his mental fitness soon surfaced in the regular media. The New York Times ran an article headlined tendency to embellish fact snags gore, while the Boston Globe weighed in with Gore seen as "misleading." On ABC’s This Week, former Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos referred to Gore’s "Pinocchio problem." For National Journal’s Stuart Taylor, the issue was "the Clintonization of Al Gore, who increasingly apes his boss in fictionalizing his life story and mangling the truth for political gain." Washington Post editor Bob Woodward raised the question of whether Gore "could comprehend reality," while MSNBC’s Chris Matthews compared Gore to "Zelig" and insisted, "Isn’t it getting to be delusionary?"
The well-orchestrated media cacophony had its intended effect: The election was far more competitive than it should have been -- and, indeed, was decided before the Supreme Court stepped in -- because of negative voter perceptions of Gore’s honesty and trustworthiness. In the final polls before the election and in exit polls on Election Day, voters said they favored Gore’s program over George W. Bush’s. Gore won substantial majorities not only for his position on most specific issues but also for his overall thrust. The conservative Bush theme of tax cuts and small government was rejected by voters in favor of the more liberal Gore theme of extending prosperity more broadly and standing up to corporate interests. Yet while Bush shaded the truth and misstated facts throughout the campaign on everything from the size of Gore’s federal spending proposals to his own record as governor of Texas, by substantial margins voters thought Bush was more truthful than Gore. According to an ABC exit poll, of personal qualities that mattered most to voters, 24 percent ranked "honest/trustworthy" first -- and they went for Bush over Gore by a margin of 80 percent to 15 percent. Seventy-four percent of voters said "Gore would say anything," while 58 percent thought Bush would. Among white, college-educated, male voters, Gore’s "untruthfulness" was cited overwhelmingly as a reason not to vote for him, far more than any other reason.
Two years after the election, Gore gave an extraordinary interview to the New York Observer that could be read as an explanation of what happened to his presidential campaign. Gore charged that conservatives in the media, operating under journalistic cover, are loyal not to the standards and conventions of journalism but, rather, to politics and party. Gore said:
The media is kind of weird these days on politics, and there are some major institutional voices that are, truthfully speaking, part and parcel of the Republican Party. Fox News Network, the Washington Times, Rush Limbaugh -- there’s a bunch of them, and some of them are financed by wealthy ultra-conservative billionaires who make political deals with Republican administrations and the rest of the media.... Most of the media [has] been slow to recognize the pervasive impact of this Fifth Column in their ranks -- that is, day after day, injecting the daily Republican talking points into the definition of what’s objective as stated by the news media as a whole....
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 all 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 RNC talking points are woven into the fabric of the zeitgeist....
True to form, the right-wing media greeted this factual description with yet another frenzy of repetitive messaging portraying Gore as crazy. Speaking of Gore on FOX News, The Weekly Standard’s Fred Barnes said, "This is nutty. This is along the lines with, you know, President Bush killed Paul Wellstone, and the White House knew before 9/11 that the attacks were going to happen. This is -- I mean, this is conspiratorial stuff." Also on FOX, syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer said of Gore, "I’m a psychiatrist. I don’t usually practice on camera. But this is the edge of looniness, this idea that there’s a vast conspiracy, it sits in a building, it emanates, it has these tentacles, is really at the edge. He could use a little help." "It could be he’s just nuts," Rush Limbaugh said of Gore. "Tipper Gore’s issue is what? Mental health. Right? It could be closer to home than we know." "He [Gore] said it’s a conspiracy," Tucker Carlson said on CNN’s Crossfire. "I actually think he’s coming a little unhinged," The Weekly Standard’s David Brooks, now at the New York Times, said of Gore on PBS.
The rest of the introduction is available at Buzzflash.com:
www.buzzflash.com/contributors/04/05/con04218.html