THE WAR AGAINST GORE….CONTINUED….Bob Somerby replies today to my question about whether liberals should spend more time complaining about media treatment of Al Gore during the 2000 campaign (and more generally, of media treatment of the Clintons during the 90s). My take is that I don’t think it would do us any good to harp on this; Bob thinks we’re a million light years from “harping” on it and should at least mention it on a regular basis:
Last week, Naomi Judd began telling voters that no one has ever been trashed like Palin. Quite naturally, voters tend to believe such claims, because they’ve never heard anything different….”Liberal bias” is a powerful card, a card they’ve spent fifty years perfecting. They play this card because it works; it keeps working because our side has refused to debunk it. As we’ve long said, we refuse to tell the public the truth about the press corps’ recent conduct. One side keeps saying things which are bogus. And one side won’t say what is true.
I’d say the difference here is that Judd was complaining about the treatment of Sarah Palin right now. That’s news. People care about it. Conversely, complaining about the media treatment of Al Gore a decade ago would cause audiences to yawn and turn the channel. Maybe that’s not fair, but the world is what it is.
It’s certainly true that liberals should have complained more about media treatment of Gore back when it happened (I think Bob has convinced everybody of that), but what good would it do to bring it up regularly now? It would be like conservatives continually kvetching about media treatment of Dan Quayle or Richard Nixon (who at least arguably lost the 1960 election because he got worse press treatment than JFK). Occasional passing references are fine, but anything more and audiences today will just tune out.
Much better, I think, to do what conservatives do: complain about today’s media misconduct loudly and aggressively when we think we see it. Liberals might still not be as good at media grievance mongering as conservatives, but we’ve made up a lot ground since the 2000 election. And at this stage of the game, I just don’t see how amping up our complaints about press treatment of Al Gore in the previous century will help us make up the rest of the distance.
POSTSCRIPT: I’ve gotten more than a few emails asking why I care about this. The reason is that despite his endlessly irritating and over-the-top attacks on me and others in the liberal blogosphere, I still read Bob every day. I do that because he has interesting things to say — most of which, unfortunately, get drowned out by his Gore obsession. If he’d forget about Gore, tighten up his prose, cut the snark levels down to a dull roar, and spend his time in the present, he seems like he’d be a more effective media critic. And we could use that.
