Gore media coverage--Playing hardball

To be sure, Gore has appeared to be struggling with the way he presents himself as a candidate, and he may have handed his critics ammunition with his wardrobe makeover, the hiring of the "alpha-male" expert Naomi Wolf and, more seriously, Clintonian legalisms such as "no controlling legal authority" in explaining his possible involvement in questionable fundraising. But some of the events that have become code words for Gore's exaggerations or evasions are much more complicated than those code words suggest. Bob Somerby - who runs a press-critique Web site called Dailyhowler.com - first reported several of these inconsistencies; the journalist Robert Parry also wrote about them in an article in The Washington Monthly this April. Examples:

Although Gore has been lambasted (in news articles, editorials, and talk shows) for saying he and his wife, Tipper, were the models for the characters in Erich Segal's novel Love Story, Segal confirmed in an interview with The New York Times that, as a young man at Harvard, Gore, along with the actor Tommy Lee Jones, was indeed the model for the male character. (Segal also suggested that Gore's notion that Tipper was also a model had been picked up from a reporting error in the Nashville Tennessean.)

Gore has been quoted directly - in derisive comments by Republicans as well as in news stories - as claiming that he "invented" the Internet. In fact, what he said in that interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer was, "During my service in Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet." He may have been self aggrandizing. But he didn't say he invented the Internet - and, as several Internet experts said when the jokes came flying, Gore did play an important role while in Congress in developing the Internet.

In the Love Canal flap, The Washington Post and The New York Times both misquoted Gore as saying at a high-school appearance in New Hampshire in November, "I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal . . . I was the one that started it all." In fact, what Gore had said was, "That was the one that started it all." He made his remarks in the context of telling the highschool students about another highschool student, in Toone, Tennessee, who had alerted his congressional staff to problems with toxic waste. Both newspapers eventually ran corrections - but not until the damage had been done.

On the Elian flap, while many critics derided Gore for pandering to CubanAmericans, his position from the start had been that the matter should be resolved in family court - and he was responding to legislation that would allow the child to stay in the U.S. while the matter was resolved.

As the Democratic convention approached there were signs that Gore's press was improving. Gore's proposals for child-care and other family-friendly proposals were treated seriously and non-ironically in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and other publications. And, in a strongly worded column after the Republican convention, the Post's Richard Cohen said that George W. Bush had "lied" about several claims - including the Clinton administration's record on Social Security, his assertion (later denied by the Army) about two Army divisions being unprepared for combat, and, of course, his wildly applauded joke about Al Gore "inventing" the Internet.