Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them_ A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right - Al Franken [16]
Tone of Coverage for Gore & Bush
* * *
Positive: Gore: 13% Bush: 24%
Neutral: Gore: 31% Bush: 27%
Negative: Gore: 56% Bush: 49%
Total: Gore: 100% Bush: 100%
* * *
Holy shit! This makes no sense. The numbers for Gore, the liberal, were more negative and a lot less positive than the numbers for Bush. The media, which we just assumed to be liberal, because that’s what we had heard so often, was actually nicer to the conservative! Could that possibly be true? Let’s look at it again.
Tone of Coverage for Gore & Bush
* * *
Positive: Gore: 13% Bush: 24%
Neutral: Gore: 31% Bush: 27%
Negative: Gore: 56% Bush: 49%
Total: Gore: 100% Bush: 100%
* * *
Holy shit!
A million questions raced through our minds. Who are these Pew people? Where do these numbers come from? Was this just another liberal lie?
No. It turns out that the Pew Charitable Trusts are among the largest, most prestigious foundations in America. Totally mainstream. Their Project for Excellence in Journalism comes out of the top-rated Columbia School of Journalism and is one of the few media research organizations without a political axe to grind.
And the numbers? Turns out they came from a comprehensive study examining 1,149 stories from seventeen leading news sources.
What could this possibly mean? Either there was something terribly wrong with our HLMP Matrix, or there is something terribly wrong with Ann, Sean, and Bernard.
So what had happened? It turns out that TeamFranken had spent the 2000 election cycle locked away in its ivory tower. Any normal American who watched the news or read the papers that year would have noticed that the media just hated Al Gore.
Somewhere along the line, the pack decided that Al Gore was a sanctimonious, graspy exaggerator running against a likeable if dim-witted goof-off. Instead of covering the issues and how they might affect average Americans, the media looked for little scraps of evidence to support its story line of Gore the Exaggerator.
They found them in the unlikeliest places. For example, where he didn’t exaggerate. Take his role in the creation of the Internet. In the 1980s, Gore was one of the handful of leaders who foresaw the tremendous potential of Arpanet, an emergency military computer network. As both a congressman and a senator, Gore fought tirelessly for the funding that would turn Arpanet into what is now the Internet.
The Internet, as you may know, became a big hit in the nineties and briefly enjoyed a great deal of media coverage. With this in mind, Gore told Wolf Blitzer in a 1999 interview, “During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.”
What do you suppose he meant? That, late at night in his office in the Russell Building, after the other senators had gone home, he had written the PASCAL code that allowed packet switching? Probably not. No. What he seemed to be doing is what members of Congress do: He was taking credit for a program he championed and funded. In this case one that revolutionized the information infrastructure of the entire world.
What an asshole.
The phrase “invented the Internet” first appeared in a Republican Party press release and would be repeated by the “liberal” press thousands of times during the campaign. What should have been an enormous credit to the man’s vision became a symbol of his insidious, compulsive dishonesty. Ironically, Gore was sometimes criticized via the Internet itself!
When a few people—like me—pointed out that he hadn’t said that he had invented the Internet, Ann Coulter responded: “In point of fact, ‘create’ is a synonym for ‘invent.’ Any thesaurus will quickly confirm this.” That may be true. But the very same thesaurus would