While many may no longer remember it, a major reason for Gore’s defeat in the election of 2000, among others, was the oft repeated charge, carried widely by the media, that Gore had difficulty with the truth; that at best he exaggerated a lot, and at worst that he was a congenital liar. What was that based on?
There were two major charges:
1.) That Gore claimed he invented the Internet, and
2.) That he had discovered the environmental disaster at Love Canal and was instrumental in the
passing of the Superfund law,
3.) and that neither was true.
The fact is that Gore made neither claim and that what he claimed was in fact entirely true. With respect to the Internet, Gore said, “I took the initiative in creating the Internet.”
Here are the facts:
In 1989, Gore introduced the National High-Performance Computer Technology Act, a five-year, $1.7 billion program to expand the capacity of the information highway to connect government, industry, and academic institutions. Signed by President Bush in 1991, the bill supported research and development for an improved national computer system, and assisted colleges and libraries in connecting to the new network. In 1989, when few public officials grasped the profound changes that new information technology would bring, Gore saw them plainly. "I genuinely believe that the creation of this nationwide network will create an environment where work stations are common in homes and even small businesses," he told a House committee in the spring of 1989.
On this basis Gore said in an interview with Wolf Blitzer of CNN, “During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.” As can be seen, this was entirely true. HE DID NOT SAY HE “INVENTED” THE INTERNET.
But of course, the RNC lie machine quickly changed the quote and the media ran with it misquoting Gore over and over again and spreading the malicious lie that Gore was a congenital liar.
Similarly on Love Canal and the Superfund law Gore in speaking to a group of high school students in Concord, N.H. exhorted them to reject cynicism and to recognize that individual citizens can effect important changes. As an example, he cited a high school girl from Toone, Tenn., a town that had experienced problems with toxic waste. She brought the issue to the attention of Gore's congressional office in the late 1970s. "I called for a congressional investigation and a hearing," Gore told the students. "I looked around the country for other sites like that. I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. Had the first hearing on that issue, and Toone, Tennessee---that was the one that you didn't hear of. But that was the one that started it all." Gore was referring to Toone, Tenn. As having started it all.
After learning about the Toone situation, Gore looked for other examples and "found" a similar case at Love Canal. He was not claiming to have been the first one to discover Love Canal, which already had been evacuated. He simply needed other case studies for the hearings.
The next day, The Washington Post stripped Gore's comments of their context and gave them a negative twist “I was the one that started it all,' he said." [WP, Dec. 1, 1999] The New York Times ran a slightly less contentious story with the same false quote: "I was the one that started it all."
Instead of taking the offensive against these misquotes, Gore tried to head off the controversy by clarifying his meaning and apologizing if anyone got the wrong impression. Maybe he should have taken the offensive but it is difficult if not impossible to take on the Washington Post and the NY Times and the rest of the media.
The national pundit shows quickly picked up the story of Gore's new exaggeration.
“It seems to me... he's now the guy who created the Love Canal [case]. I mean, isn't this getting ridiculous?... Isn't it getting to be delusionary?"Matthews of CNBC's "Hardball" turned to his baffled guest, Lois Gibbs, the Love Canal resident who is widely credited with bringing the issue to public attention. She sounded confused about why Gore would claim credit for discovering Love Canal, but defended Gore's hard work on the issue. "I actually think he's done a great job," Gibbs said. "I mean, he really did work, when nobody else was working, on trying to define what the hazards were in this country and how to clean it up and helping with the Superfund and other legislation." [CNBC's "Hardball," Dec. 1, 1999]
That night, CNBC's "Hardball" returned to the Love Canal story. "It reminds me of Snoopy thinking he's the Red Baron," laughed Chris Matthews. "I mean how did he get this idea? Now you've seen Al Gore in action. That he invented the Internet. He now is the guy who discovered Love Canal."
Yet, while the national media was excoriating Gore, the Concord students who were present for the original quote, pressed for a correction from The Washington Post and The New York Times.
Finally, on Dec. 7, a week after Gore's comment, the Washington Post published a partial correction, tucked away as the last item in a corrections box.
Three days later, The New York Times followed suit with a correction of its own, but again without fully explaining Gore's position. While the students voiced disillusionment, the two reporters involved showed no remorse for their mistake. "I really do think that the whole thing has been blown out of proportion," said Katharine Seelye of the Times. "It was one word."
IT IS A SAD STORY AND IT DOES NOT REFLECT WELL ON OUR MEDIA.
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Sunday, March 11, 2007
The Media! (Watergate/Clinton)
In my essay entitled “Support Our Troops” I said, “Thank God for the Washington Post” for exposing the scandal at Walter Reed Hospital. But maybe the real story is how rarely the media exposed government scandals until Bush’s popularity began to fall. Even now the Washington Post exposé leaves questions unanswered. Members of Congress had been complaining to the Army's surgeon general, for more than three years. Why did it take the Post three years to pick up the story and where was the rest of the media? Finally when the story broke it was confined to Walter Reeld. Now it turns out such conditions are endemic throughout all the veterans’ hospitals. A few generals are made scapegoats and the media praises the Defense Secretary for swift action, but very little is said about the fact that the conditions were brought about by the Administration and it’s cohort in the Republican Congress cutting the budget for veterans care, firing many of it’s experienced staff and outsourcing the work to a subsidiary of Bechtel. Maybe Kudos to the Washington Post and certainly to the rest of the media has been overblown.
Let us take the NY Times! That paper broke the story of warrantless wiretapping. They have been subjected to all kinds of invective by the White House and Right wing publications and pundits. So is this a case of journalistic courage. But it turns out the paper sat on the story for more than a year before releasing it and refuses to say why it delayed letting the public know of this major violation of the U.S. Constitution. Better late than never, but is this the kind of journalism that informs as soon as it knows?
If these papers, the best of the best in the media field fail us, what is the story with regard to the rest of the media?
Let us go back to the Watergate scandal. The burglary of Democratic Headquarters occurred on June 17, 1972 reported by the Washington Post on that day. By June 19 Woodward and Bernstein were on the case and reported that a GOP security aide was among the Watergate burglars and that former attorney general John Mitchell, head of the Nixon reelection campaign, denies any link to the operation. From then on the two reporters filed one story after another reporting ever-clearer evidence that the Nixon reelection campaign was behind the burglary and that the F.B.I. had found a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage. Yet during this whole period leading up to the election no other paper reported on the story, causing the Post reporters to wonder why their spectacular story had no resonance with the rest of the media. Had the broad media picked up the story it may be that Nixon would not have been reelected. Within three month after the election former Nixon aides G. Gordon Liddy and James W. McCord Jr. were convicted. From then on events moved to the impeachment and resignation of the President. But where was the media when the Post was reporting spectacular events prior to the election. There was a conspiracy of silence.
Contrast this to the media’s behavior during the campaign leading up to the election of Bill Clinton and throughout the Clinton Presidency. There was a crescendo of media allegations about sexual peccadilloes. Gennifer Flowers alleged a twelve year affair with Clinton, which received wide press coverage. Her revelation lead to her getting a nude centerfold in Penthouse magazine and the ownership of a cabaret in New Orleans. On the other hand an allegation, corroborated by many sources, that George Bush had an affair with one Jennifer Fitzgerald at least since 1974 and until at least the 1992 election received scant notice from the press.
Even more press coverage was given to the saga of Paula Jones who probably would never have come forward but for an article in the Right wing Spectator magazine written by David Brock. (Brock also wrote the slanderous book, “The Real Anita Hill” and later an article for the Spectator in which he called Anita Hill "a bit nutty and a bit slutty." Subsequently Brock apologized and said that everything he had written was a lie for which he had been well paid.) Brock had written, “On this particular evening after her encounter with Clinton, which lasted no more than an hour as the troopers stood by in the hall, the troopers said Paula told him she was available to be Clinton’s girlfriend if he so desired.” Paula who until then had never spoken of an encounter with Governor Clinton was outraged, and wanted a correction and an apology” But from this sprang Troopergate and the belated suit against Clinton which Paula wanted to settle, but by then had became a tool of the Right who paid her expenses, sponsored her appearance with the troopers (who also indicated they wanted payoffs) at the “Political Action Conference” and kept pushing on all fronts with the SUPPORT AND PUBLICITY OF THE MEDIA until pay dirt in the Monica Lewinsky affair.
But this wasn’t all! The Right took a minor investment of the Clinton’s with one Jim McDougal, in which the Clinton’s lost money, into the notorious Whitewater affair pursued by the partisan ideologue, Kenneth Starr, who in the end found no wrongdoing. If not for the baying of the media there would have been no independent counsel and no endless investigation.
When Vince Foster, suffering depression from the tensions in the White House took his own life, after he was attacked by the Wall Street Journal, the press questioned the suicide and suggested murder. A sensational story but with no basis in fact.
When the Clinton White House fired fourteen employees engaged in making travel arrangements for White House staff, a matter that could hardly be considered of National significance, it became TRAVELGATE and the media ran with it.
When Clinton stopped to get a haircut at an airport the cost of the haircut and the possibility of planes being delayed became grist for the media’s frenzy.
The favorite of the “neutral press” was their adaptation of the pejorative reference to the President as “Slick Willie.”
I can’t possibly do justice to the hatchet job done with the willing, enthusiastic collaboration of the press, which treated Hillary Clinton’s correct charge of a “Vast Right Wing conspiracy” with disdain. However, the facts bear her out. The Arkansas Project is known to have undertaken a four-year effort organized through the American Spectator magazine to discredit the president. Scaife foundation money, as Salon has reported, has also allegedly been used to pay key Whitewater witness David Hale and to help bankroll Paula Jones' sexual harassment case against Clinton.
(As an aside it should be noted that between 1985 and 2001, the Sarah Mellon Scaife Foundation donated $15,860,000 to the Heritage Foundation; $7,333,000 to the Institute for Policy Analysis; $6,995,500 to the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace; $6,693,000 to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS); $4,411,000 to the American Enterprise Institute; $2,575,000 to the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research; $1,855,000 to the George C. Marshall Institute; $1,808,000 to the Hudson Institute; and $1,697,000 to the Cato Institute.)
Next time, the media’s hatchet job on Al Gore and John Kerry, and its cheer leading the President’s march to war.
Let us take the NY Times! That paper broke the story of warrantless wiretapping. They have been subjected to all kinds of invective by the White House and Right wing publications and pundits. So is this a case of journalistic courage. But it turns out the paper sat on the story for more than a year before releasing it and refuses to say why it delayed letting the public know of this major violation of the U.S. Constitution. Better late than never, but is this the kind of journalism that informs as soon as it knows?
If these papers, the best of the best in the media field fail us, what is the story with regard to the rest of the media?
Let us go back to the Watergate scandal. The burglary of Democratic Headquarters occurred on June 17, 1972 reported by the Washington Post on that day. By June 19 Woodward and Bernstein were on the case and reported that a GOP security aide was among the Watergate burglars and that former attorney general John Mitchell, head of the Nixon reelection campaign, denies any link to the operation. From then on the two reporters filed one story after another reporting ever-clearer evidence that the Nixon reelection campaign was behind the burglary and that the F.B.I. had found a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage. Yet during this whole period leading up to the election no other paper reported on the story, causing the Post reporters to wonder why their spectacular story had no resonance with the rest of the media. Had the broad media picked up the story it may be that Nixon would not have been reelected. Within three month after the election former Nixon aides G. Gordon Liddy and James W. McCord Jr. were convicted. From then on events moved to the impeachment and resignation of the President. But where was the media when the Post was reporting spectacular events prior to the election. There was a conspiracy of silence.
Contrast this to the media’s behavior during the campaign leading up to the election of Bill Clinton and throughout the Clinton Presidency. There was a crescendo of media allegations about sexual peccadilloes. Gennifer Flowers alleged a twelve year affair with Clinton, which received wide press coverage. Her revelation lead to her getting a nude centerfold in Penthouse magazine and the ownership of a cabaret in New Orleans. On the other hand an allegation, corroborated by many sources, that George Bush had an affair with one Jennifer Fitzgerald at least since 1974 and until at least the 1992 election received scant notice from the press.
Even more press coverage was given to the saga of Paula Jones who probably would never have come forward but for an article in the Right wing Spectator magazine written by David Brock. (Brock also wrote the slanderous book, “The Real Anita Hill” and later an article for the Spectator in which he called Anita Hill "a bit nutty and a bit slutty." Subsequently Brock apologized and said that everything he had written was a lie for which he had been well paid.) Brock had written, “On this particular evening after her encounter with Clinton, which lasted no more than an hour as the troopers stood by in the hall, the troopers said Paula told him she was available to be Clinton’s girlfriend if he so desired.” Paula who until then had never spoken of an encounter with Governor Clinton was outraged, and wanted a correction and an apology” But from this sprang Troopergate and the belated suit against Clinton which Paula wanted to settle, but by then had became a tool of the Right who paid her expenses, sponsored her appearance with the troopers (who also indicated they wanted payoffs) at the “Political Action Conference” and kept pushing on all fronts with the SUPPORT AND PUBLICITY OF THE MEDIA until pay dirt in the Monica Lewinsky affair.
But this wasn’t all! The Right took a minor investment of the Clinton’s with one Jim McDougal, in which the Clinton’s lost money, into the notorious Whitewater affair pursued by the partisan ideologue, Kenneth Starr, who in the end found no wrongdoing. If not for the baying of the media there would have been no independent counsel and no endless investigation.
When Vince Foster, suffering depression from the tensions in the White House took his own life, after he was attacked by the Wall Street Journal, the press questioned the suicide and suggested murder. A sensational story but with no basis in fact.
When the Clinton White House fired fourteen employees engaged in making travel arrangements for White House staff, a matter that could hardly be considered of National significance, it became TRAVELGATE and the media ran with it.
When Clinton stopped to get a haircut at an airport the cost of the haircut and the possibility of planes being delayed became grist for the media’s frenzy.
The favorite of the “neutral press” was their adaptation of the pejorative reference to the President as “Slick Willie.”
I can’t possibly do justice to the hatchet job done with the willing, enthusiastic collaboration of the press, which treated Hillary Clinton’s correct charge of a “Vast Right Wing conspiracy” with disdain. However, the facts bear her out. The Arkansas Project is known to have undertaken a four-year effort organized through the American Spectator magazine to discredit the president. Scaife foundation money, as Salon has reported, has also allegedly been used to pay key Whitewater witness David Hale and to help bankroll Paula Jones' sexual harassment case against Clinton.
(As an aside it should be noted that between 1985 and 2001, the Sarah Mellon Scaife Foundation donated $15,860,000 to the Heritage Foundation; $7,333,000 to the Institute for Policy Analysis; $6,995,500 to the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace; $6,693,000 to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS); $4,411,000 to the American Enterprise Institute; $2,575,000 to the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research; $1,855,000 to the George C. Marshall Institute; $1,808,000 to the Hudson Institute; and $1,697,000 to the Cato Institute.)
Next time, the media’s hatchet job on Al Gore and John Kerry, and its cheer leading the President’s march to war.
Thursday, March 01, 2007
"Support Our Troops."
There are so many issues I could address that I find myself in something close to paralysis in deciding which one to address.
One, however, has been bothering me for a long time and that is the slogan and the bumper stickers proclaiming, “SUPPORT OUR TROOPS.”
I have often wondered what that means. I know that is used as a euphemism for support of the war and it has been used not only in this war but in past wars as well. But is supporting a war, supporting our troops? How does getting our men and women killed and maimed supporting them?
I don’t for one moment want to suggest that supporting a war is not often a necessary endeavor. Few would question the necessity of our being in the Second World War against Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan. Support for that war was a matter of national survival. But even then I cannot see how support for the war was “SUPPORTING OUR TROOPS.” Being of an advanced age I remember how we supported our troops. It wasn’t with slogans like “SUPPORT OUR TROOPS” or even by wearing flag pins in our lapels. We didn’t tell them, ““you fight with the Army you have, not the one you want” as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, told our troops. When we went to war we supported our troops by converting our auto industry to making tanks. Nothing was spared into turning our industry into making the armaments our soldiers needed. We didn’t send them into battle under equipped and undermanned as we have in Iraq.
I remember I was a youth in middle school at the time. Both boys and girls learned to knit so as to make woolen squares that could be sown together to make blankets for our soldiers. Nothing was too good for them. That was supporting our troops!
And we even made sure that our allies had all the armaments they needed. We became the “Arsenal of Democracy.” Now our troops are ill equipped and we keep hearing that the Iraqi troops that are supposed to pick up the baton, so our troops can leave, are under trained and ill equipped. Why aren’t we equipping them? Billions are spent and they disappear in corruption and war profiteering and our troops and their allies are ill equipped.
“SUPPORT OUR TROOPS” at the least is equipping them and taking care of their needs, but this administration and their lackeys in this Congress don’t give a damn about supporting our troops. To them our troops simply serve their political agenda. When we have a bunch of cowards at the highest levels of government who lie and cheat what can you expect?
Where was our Vice-President during the Vietnam War when others were dying for their country? He, as he himself stated, “ He had other priorities.” Oh what patriotism!
And our President got himself into the National Guard where he knew he would not have to fight because in that war we used regular Army troops and didn’t decimate our Guard and Reserves and break our Army in the process. And even then he went AWOL because he had more important things to do.
SUPPORT OUR TROOPS!
SUPPORT OUR TROOPS by sending them into an endless war with no clear objectives and no end in sight?
SUPPORT OUR TROOPS by overextending their deployment and by sending them back again and again far beyond their original enlistment.
SUPPORT OUR TROOPS by denying them the armor they need?
And now we discover that when they come home they are housed in slum housing outside our Walter Reed Army Medical Center in a dingy former hotel on Georgia Avenue where the wounded were housed among mice, mold, rot and cockroaches. Where was the Republican Congress oversight over the past three years that this couldn’t be discovered? But did anybody really care? I guess they had other priorities.
It took investigative reporting, of which we have had far too little to expose this outrage. Thank God for the Washington Post. Was it a surprise? Top officials at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, including the Army's surgeon general, have heard complaints about outpatient neglect from family members, veterans groups, and members of Congress for more than three years. What did they do? Nothing! Men and women who served their country in Iraq and came home maimed, with shrapnel in their heads and in their brains, without legs or arms or other horrendous injuries. What do they get? Neglect!
SUPPORT OUR TROOPS!
It is time that we supported them by bringing them home so they can put their lives back together and try to resume normal lives.
But in the meantime give them the medical care they need; give them the armor they need. Equip the Iraqi troops with the weapons they need. It is time that the people entrusted with the safety of our troops stopped having other priorities.
It is time for them to support our troops by truly caring about them. This government obviously does not and never has.
The truly sad thing is that it will be almost another two years before we can send them packing along with their cohorts in the Congress.
One, however, has been bothering me for a long time and that is the slogan and the bumper stickers proclaiming, “SUPPORT OUR TROOPS.”
I have often wondered what that means. I know that is used as a euphemism for support of the war and it has been used not only in this war but in past wars as well. But is supporting a war, supporting our troops? How does getting our men and women killed and maimed supporting them?
I don’t for one moment want to suggest that supporting a war is not often a necessary endeavor. Few would question the necessity of our being in the Second World War against Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan. Support for that war was a matter of national survival. But even then I cannot see how support for the war was “SUPPORTING OUR TROOPS.” Being of an advanced age I remember how we supported our troops. It wasn’t with slogans like “SUPPORT OUR TROOPS” or even by wearing flag pins in our lapels. We didn’t tell them, ““you fight with the Army you have, not the one you want” as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, told our troops. When we went to war we supported our troops by converting our auto industry to making tanks. Nothing was spared into turning our industry into making the armaments our soldiers needed. We didn’t send them into battle under equipped and undermanned as we have in Iraq.
I remember I was a youth in middle school at the time. Both boys and girls learned to knit so as to make woolen squares that could be sown together to make blankets for our soldiers. Nothing was too good for them. That was supporting our troops!
And we even made sure that our allies had all the armaments they needed. We became the “Arsenal of Democracy.” Now our troops are ill equipped and we keep hearing that the Iraqi troops that are supposed to pick up the baton, so our troops can leave, are under trained and ill equipped. Why aren’t we equipping them? Billions are spent and they disappear in corruption and war profiteering and our troops and their allies are ill equipped.
“SUPPORT OUR TROOPS” at the least is equipping them and taking care of their needs, but this administration and their lackeys in this Congress don’t give a damn about supporting our troops. To them our troops simply serve their political agenda. When we have a bunch of cowards at the highest levels of government who lie and cheat what can you expect?
Where was our Vice-President during the Vietnam War when others were dying for their country? He, as he himself stated, “ He had other priorities.” Oh what patriotism!
And our President got himself into the National Guard where he knew he would not have to fight because in that war we used regular Army troops and didn’t decimate our Guard and Reserves and break our Army in the process. And even then he went AWOL because he had more important things to do.
SUPPORT OUR TROOPS!
SUPPORT OUR TROOPS by sending them into an endless war with no clear objectives and no end in sight?
SUPPORT OUR TROOPS by overextending their deployment and by sending them back again and again far beyond their original enlistment.
SUPPORT OUR TROOPS by denying them the armor they need?
And now we discover that when they come home they are housed in slum housing outside our Walter Reed Army Medical Center in a dingy former hotel on Georgia Avenue where the wounded were housed among mice, mold, rot and cockroaches. Where was the Republican Congress oversight over the past three years that this couldn’t be discovered? But did anybody really care? I guess they had other priorities.
It took investigative reporting, of which we have had far too little to expose this outrage. Thank God for the Washington Post. Was it a surprise? Top officials at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, including the Army's surgeon general, have heard complaints about outpatient neglect from family members, veterans groups, and members of Congress for more than three years. What did they do? Nothing! Men and women who served their country in Iraq and came home maimed, with shrapnel in their heads and in their brains, without legs or arms or other horrendous injuries. What do they get? Neglect!
SUPPORT OUR TROOPS!
It is time that we supported them by bringing them home so they can put their lives back together and try to resume normal lives.
But in the meantime give them the medical care they need; give them the armor they need. Equip the Iraqi troops with the weapons they need. It is time that the people entrusted with the safety of our troops stopped having other priorities.
It is time for them to support our troops by truly caring about them. This government obviously does not and never has.
The truly sad thing is that it will be almost another two years before we can send them packing along with their cohorts in the Congress.
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