The media's assault on reason
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 (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 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 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 to prove it, having suffered some of the most egregious media cheap shots 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 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 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 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 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 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 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[s] 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.
For the record, last week in Chicago my daughter and I stood in line twice -- once early in the morning and once at noon -- to get Al's autograph on our copies of Assault on Reason. In both queues, 100% good liberals, his presidential ambitions and prospects were topics A, B, and C; global warming was a distant D.
Amazing -- they actually stooped to judging a book by it's cover.
No more to say - your insight has covered that topic.
Rush Limbaugh is digging up old quotes of Gore's from the early 90s, supposedly to prove what a hypocrite Gore is on Saddam Hussein. I find this fascinating, since Rush and his fellow Propaganda Parrots insist that how we got into Iraq no longer matters.
Much like with the Yale educated lesbians shtick the pundits greatest fear is that we might elect someone who knows things and thinks about stuff. Why would we want to ruin the dazzling success of the past 7 years?
I didn't realize George W. was a lesbian! ;)
You go way to easy on Sawyer who asked "Are you saying, in this book and this morning, that Americans -- 3,000 of them -- died unnecessarily?." Journalists should not use buzz words (or blame Gore in advance for suggesting that deaths were unnecessary rather that Bush for causing unnecessary deaths). More importantly however, journalists should know the facts "U.S. Military Deaths in Iraq at 3,505 By The Associated Press
As of Sunday, June 10, 2007, at least 3,505 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count." [link to tinyurl.com] .
That is a grade A howler.
Also get a brain Morans [link to tinyurl.com]
I feel Mr.Gore is the smartest man on the planet...and should be President
My favorite line from Milbank's May 30 Washington Post column:
"Imagine the Iowa hog farmer cracking open "Assault on Reason," and meeting Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Paine, John Kenneth Galbraith, Walter Lippmann, Johannes Gutenberg, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Jefferson and Marshall McLuhan -- all before finishing the introduction."
Actually, I'd take the intellegence of the Iowa hog farmer over Milbank and the other Post pundits any day.
imagine him cracking open the WaPo and learning that Dana Milbank regards him as an illiterate halfwit.
At least a couple of the dead white males cited here by Gore were pig farmers.
[link to www.washingtonpost.com]
Bush Is Losing Credibility On Democracy
[link to www.tompaine.com]
...
The GOP voter-fraud vendetta might have remained exactly where Bush loyalists wanted it—below the radar of the press—had it not been for the scandal surrounding the firing of eight U. S. attorneys,...
ACORN became a target because of its successful voter-registration work. As the 2004 election approached, then-Attorney-General John Ashcroft launched a broad initiative to crack down on supposed voter fraud in battleground states, including Florida, Missouri, Ohio and New Mexico, where ACORN was making headway registering voters. In all of those states, Republicans filed suits against ACORN for voter fraud, and, in every case, ACORN was exonerated....
Nevertheless, conservative media continued to smear the group...
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The reason the media has to attack Gore is because he is trying to get the public to get involved in the democratic process by getting them to talk about it.
Bush and his loyalists are on the jihad to destroy democracy here in America and abroad.
But if he did win nomination and election, the SCOTUS would certainly rule that he had already been elected once before, and could not under law go for re-election in 2012. Gore shoulders the burdens of intellect in this dismal age, and those who attack him likely long for their copy of "My Pet Goat".
And you too can be ridiculed by the ignorant.
It used to be that life was a continual learning process. Our ability to reason is what set us apart from the lesser life forms.
Welcome to the third world, America.
From Ferguson and the WAPO
To gray ladies and network shows
Al Gore illustrates
How the MSM negates
Real news coverage by supposed "pros"
A partial solution, at least, to the idiots out there who are badly interpreting the book, is to make sure that as many good people out there actually have the opportunity to read it and see for themselves what Gore is talking about.
Buy it, read it, pass it on.
David Brooks and the gutter snipe, Dowd
Don't do the Gray Lady so proud
Maureen's full of snot
A true scribe, she is not
Silly blather by Brooks is avowed
I can't help but think of a scene in "Bob Roberts": The campaign is ramping up, sh*t is hitting the fan and the audience waiting for the press to dig in and do its duty.
Cut to the newscast set and the two anchors (played by James Spader and Susan Sarandon) just about dissolve into giggles as if stoned and on helium.
Just like Network: Another work of satire that time turns into documentary.
i did read his column about gore's book when it came out, and i thought to myself this is the same garbage we've been hearing for years. mock gore for his high-falutin' ways and his fancy words. meanwhile brooks and his many fellow travelers in the press depicted the illiterate, bumbling, and arrogant bush as a down to earth, homespun son of the southwest, wise in his humble way.
Great dissection of the media's reaction to Al Gore.
Very good column Eric. I'd hope to see you and those of your ilk more visible in our media as time passes.
MMFAs ranking as the #1 media overseer is far down the list of most visited sites. I would suspect Paris, Anna Nichole, Britney, etal list well above this. No wonder the Media spends so much time on them and relatively little on politics, the vast majority of people are just not interested (and this is not a good thing for the future of our country). One can take politics too seriously, which I think MMFA does at times, but we (the people) need to keep ourselves informed of topics political as in the long run, they will have more effect on our lives than Paris, Anna Nichole, Britney, etal..
I am not too sure whether people are not interested in politics. But it is not just politics that are not being covered or not getting the place in the media it deserves. Of course, it is also, if politics are involved, what reportes mention about it (eg, the words are too fancy, look at his tie, she is bitchy etc). News of Paris may interest people, but that used to be covered by magazines, and not the newspaper of the 6 o'clock news.
The MSM loves fear. Fear pushes product. "Is mold lethal to your children? We'll tell you!" "What everyone shold know about toe-jam and diabetes, tonight on News Team 6!" "Coming up next, just how safe are you? Eight on your Side reporter, Justine Lake, tells us!"
Terrorists hitting America was like hitting the lottery for them. I"m not saying they wanted us to be hit on 9/11, but they weren't (and aren't) shy about exploiting it.
Click on the Ferguson column and you see this at the top:
Correction to This Article Andrew Ferguson's June 10 Outlook article, "What Al Wishes Abe Said," said that former vice president Al Gore's book "The Assault on Reason" does not contain footnotes. The book contains 20 pages of endnotes.
Then you read the column -- leading with the error! Hilarious ... and sad.
In midtown Manhattan,New York City there is the Museum of Television and Radio. When we have destroyed ourselves or runined the earth's ability to sustain life as we know it, someone or something will scour the earth in search of what happened to our species. I believe that if successful they will find this edifice to the half truth and the mediocre and say "this is where the end began."
But hope springs eternal and my hope is that network TV will go the way of the music industry. Much like the music industry post iPod, we will see an exponential growth in on-demand TV, ala Apple TV and the like. And just like the music industry exec's now whine about anemic record sales network televison executives will lament, "How did this happen, where did everybody go?"
Maybe not this Father's day but surely the next I will ask for Apple TV or some variation thereof and never look back.
Well of course. Gore harkens back to a time when average people read and discussed different philosophies to the point that they could envision and implement an entirely new system of government. If we tried that experiment again, clowns like Milbank would be shaking a cup on the street corner.
is the heroic chronicler of the media's War on Gore. He should get a Pulitzer for his work.
It seems that too many in the media are like the most popular in high school, who never can discuss anything that is real or serious. They criticize the students who are.
Unlike, much of the media of earlier generations, they only seek to entertain. They make fun of any serious discussion or don't even believe that that there is one. They won't or can't address the merits of any statement. They are susceptible to adopting the talking points of those who they perceive to be the most popular. And at this point, it is clear that they do not even know that they do this.
The Republican political methodology seems to have centered almost exclusively on personal attacks, creation and exploitation of false dichotomies, and demagoguing divisive personal issues starting with the successful 1968 Nixon campaign.
Arguably, due in part to this poisoning of the political process, Republicans now stand responsible for more substantive damage to the Republic than all enemies of America since 1789 combined.
I believe that most Americans are becoming increasingly aware of and disgusted by both the Republicans' egregious record when governing and their despicable campaign tactics.
But, I could be wrong.
I love Al, and did find the language to get a bit boorish, but I was still able to find the message. While I suppose the Beltway Boys will call in a fashion expert to critique any blowback from Paris Hilton.
When we live in a world where Ann Coulter is looked at as an expert on foriegn policy and we are more concerned about Lindsay Lohan's underage drinking more than our own neighbor's kids or war, or election fraud...we've got problems.
Your last paragraph sums it up pretty well. The people who are part of the problem, don't know it, and prove the point further by hindering informed national debates.
It's like trying to tell a deaf person they are deaf by yelling at them.
When the paperback comes out he should add a chapter based on your findings and title it, "The Irony of the Assault on Reason."
But as Dylan said, "If you aren't part of the solution you are part of the problem." Al needs to run or at least get active to unite the DNC.
Journos and talking heads are indeed envious of Gore's knowledge; they routinely pontificate without knowing much and he shames them because he's the real deal in a culture that adores fakes (like Bush) and disparages erudition.
I've had readers of my academic mysteries complain that the narrator, Nick Hoffman, mentions too many books. But he's an English professor, I remind them--he lives in and through and for books. One even said, "He uses words I don't know." I couldn't answer that except to say, Guilty as charged.
This is what disturbs people about Gore--he's smart and simply being smart and well-read makes them feel the opposite. In their shame, they respond with contempt. They are just waiting for him to be drafted for the presidential nomination, because he is the perfect target on which to exorcise their inadequacy.
On Charlie Rose's interview of Al Gore on PBS, once Mr. Gore got past the seemingly mandatory question regarding the possibility of his becoming a presidential candidate, Gore discussed some of the topics covered in "Assault on Reason". The book is aptly named. For years, not just the last 7 years, there has been a nearly raptuous celebration by many, amplified by the media, and left unchallenged by the Fourth Estate, a near panting praise for those who "speak from the gut", "simple & plain-spoken", "folksy" and say disarming charming things like "I don't understand many things, I didn't do well in school, but I know this to be true...." You can speak with utter sincerity, with great passion, with selfless love, with unwaivering conviction and still be completely, uncategorially wrong. There is a complete failure in our public discourse to approach the complex difficult problems with facts, logic, and civil reasoned debate which will have to include both sides of the argument having to accept each was not 100% correct about everything in your arguments. If you are playing chess against Garry Kasparov, no matter how strongly you believe you made the right moves, there is no reasonable argument after Kasparov checkmates you. If It was easy, we would be reading how our anscestors found the solution so many years ago. (assuming that the study of history and independent critical reading are still an accepted mode of acquiring knowledge)
But I digress...
When did it become a liability to be smart? When did it become a shortcoming to aqcuire a vocabulary and demonstrate the ability to use it with precision and alacrity? When did it become a burden, almost to great to bear, to display a high degree of erudition in their daily work and interactions?
Honestly, I think Gore is smart but in a way I truly respect in a politician. On various non-trivial topics, he finds the place where he *is not* the 'smartest guy in the room' and *listens to what those learned people are saying with an open mind before deciding. Of course, that is only my opinion. Of course, it was easy for Gore to go listen to smart people, he wasn't in the political gladiatorial arena
Of course, when someone with degrees from Yale and Harvard guffaws, chuckles and back-handedly celebrates his lack of intellectual prowess, I am not sure how I can find any good in that scenerio.
It goes without saying, I could be absolutely wrong. If present with a sufficiently convincing argument based on fact, primary references and logic, I would have no recourse but to change my position.
Sadly, by doing that, I would have created another burden to bear for the rest of my conscious life.
We do live in interesting times.
The more time passes the more I am absolutely certain that Gore is our best choice for President. But, we can't sit back and wait for him.
I say: Get smart. Draft Gore.