Vanity Fair: Going After Gore
Vanity Fair has an article "Going After Gore", by Evgenia Peretz, which is a good long analysis of the issues of how press imbalance affected Gore's campaign. I wish the author has checked my "Al Gore" / Internet page, though, since the discussion of that point, while reasonably researched, could have been helpfully improved.
The press didn't object to Gore's statement until Texas Republican congressman Dick Armey led the charge, saying, "If the vice president created the Internet, then I created the interstate highway system."
Well, I suppose it's true if by "press" the writer means "respectable" press. But the propaganda was in fact started by a hatchet-job committed by a Wired News "journalist" (nominally), and Dick Armey's office picked it up from there.
A few days later the word "invented" entered the narrative. On March 15, a USA Today headline about Gore read, inventing the internet.
Again, sort of true if "narrative" means the indexed press. But I've traced the word "invented" back to the same day as the Dick Armey press release, inserted into the narrative via ... guess who ... drumroll ... the same "journalist" who wrote the creative fiction in the first place.
Sigh. So much for "citizen journalism" ...
By Seth Finkelstein | posted in politics | on September 05, 2007 02:27 PM (Infothought permalink)
