Gore for Media Czar

As you read this, the conservative punditocracy is likely in overdrive, ridiculing Al Gore for telling it straight about the media in an interview in The New York Observer last week. "The media is kind of weird these days on politics, and there are some major institutional voices that are, truthfully speaking, part and parcel of the Republican Party," Gore said. "Fox News Network, The Washington Times, Rush Limbaugh?there's a bunch of them, and some of them are financed by wealthy ultra-conservative billionaires who make political deals with Republican administrations and the rest of the media."

It is conservative pundits' stock-in-trade to nip such criticism in the bud, pronto?lest the debate shift to them, rather than staying focused on their powerful creation and whipping post, "the liberal media." They and their apologists throw out words like "delusional" and "desperate," maintaining a stranglehold on the discussion until they bludgeon the critic back into silent submission. Oftentimes liberals stand by during one of these clubbings, like scared chickens watching one of their own being dragged off to the slaughterhouse (and, cannibalistically, some join in, hoping to score some points with the slaughterers). Witness how quickly and effortlessly poor, wimpy Tom Daschle was plucked and thrown onto the barbecue after daring to criticize Rush Limbaugh two weeks ago.

Jeez, let's not let that happen this time around. Even if you think Gore is a lousy candidate it's hard to disagree with his critique, which he expresses with a lot more clarity?and balls?than most of those in the corporate-owned, supposedly "liberal media" do. (That fact alone should dispel the myth of the "liberal media.") Using ambitious, leg-flaunting blondes like Ann "Slander" Coulter and disgruntled underachievers like Bernard "Bias" Goldberg, conservatives have so successfully promoted the "liberal media" lie over the past few years that anyone runs the risk of being tarred as a far-left kook?or a distraught politician?just for stating that the emperors at Fox News and the Unification Church (backer of The Washington Times) have no clothes.

True to form, Limbaugh was hooting and howling last week, professing shock that anyone could believe Gore's claims that the conservative media has such power?yes, the same Rush Limbaugh who spouts Republican Party mantras on nearly 600 radio stations, was a commentator on NBC news on election night and was canonized recently by The Washington Post's influential Howard Kurtz as a mainstream pundit, though Limbaugh still has the same far-right positions and tactics he's always had. Actually, Kurtz's recent defense of Limbaugh (claiming that Limbaugh is "policy-oriented") is a primary example of what Gore is talking about in his Observer interview. The conservative media's pundits, positions, nonstories and half-truths are often legitimized without critique by producers, editors and reporters in the rest of the media. Why? A lot of these people are conservatives themselves and are quietly pushing an agenda, despite the pap about everyone in the media being a "librul." Others are hungry for ratings and circulation, and seem to believe that being "competitive" means sucking up. Still others appear to easily and pathetically succumb to the right's charges that they're suppressing stories because of their alleged liberal bias. This is Gore's money quote:

"Something will start at the Republican National Committee, inside the building, and it will explode the next day on the right-wing talk-show network and on Fox News and in the newspapers that play this game, The Washington Times and the others. And then they'll create a little echo chamber, and pretty soon they'll start baiting the mainstream media for allegedly ignoring the story they've pushed into the zeitgeist. And then pretty soon the mainstream media goes out and disingenuously takes a so-called objective sampling, and lo and behold, these R.N.C. talking points are woven into the fabric of the zeitgeist."

I suppose conservatives will offer a counter scenario, in which the all-powerful New York Times is used by liberals to create the echo chamber for the Democrats. The only problem with that claim is the truth: Throughout the 90s the Times was both exposing and editorializing against Bill Clinton, often in a blistering manner. If anything, the Times was often part of the conservative echo chamber, willfully or not.

Gore also points to how, "especially in the cable-TV market, it has become good economics once again to go back to a party-oriented approach to attract a hard-core following that appreciates the predictability of a right-wing point of view, but then to make aggressive and constant efforts to deny that's what they're doing in order to avoid offending the broader audience that mass advertisers want." That pretty much explains why the portly moralist Bill Bennett popped up as a new CNN morning commentator late last year (while CNN freaks about Fox's on-the-rise ratings) next to Fox News alum Paula Zahn on her American Morning show?yes, on the network that conservatives decry as the Communist News Network. You just can't help but laugh at that one, depressing as it is.

Meanwhile, which do you think is more dangerous to American democracy: the perceived cult of liberalism that supposedly envelops The New York Times, or the actual cult known as the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, which envelops The Washington Times?

I bring this up because Andrew Sullivan likes to focus on the evils of Howell Raines' New York Times, but he's now working for Moon's Washington Times, aka the Moonie Times. It's true?though he's kept it quite on the down low. He now has a sort of cut-and-paste job of a column there: items he writes on his website are given a new sentence or two to make them seem fresh. (Who said conservatives aren't into recycling?)

Sullivan has been spending lots of time lately railing against Islamic fundamentalists' ugly views on America and the West, but as the blogger named Roger Ailes (no, not that Roger Ailes?this one can be found at rogerailes.blogspot .com) pointed out, Sullivan is now silent about what his new employer, the Rev. Moon, has to say about us heathens in the West, which eerily doesn't sound much different from Osama bin Laden's thoughts on these matters:

"America is the kingdom of extreme individualism, the kingdom of free sex? The country that represents Satan's harvest is America."

"America doesn't have anywhere to go now."

"[Homosexuals and] those who go after free sex [are] less than animals."

"If you misuse your love organ, you destroy your life, your nation, your world."

"If you stay away from having children, you cannot enter the kingdom of God. You are bound to go to somewhere else?you can call it Hell."

Moon believes that he is the Messiah who has been sent to finish the work that Jesus did not. I think it's safe to say that Osama has a similar complex?and you can see where that's led.

Why did I meander into this (beyond, admittedly, relishing the opportunity to take another well-deserved shot at silly Sullivan)? Simply to underscore how little the corporate, so-called "liberal media" focuses on the engines of conservative media while repeatedly giving a platform to conservative pundits who regularly dissect and skewer liberals. I'm not sure how I feel about Gore as the Democratic presidential candidate in 2004, but, hell, if we elected media critics in this country, he'd have my vote in an instant.

Michelangelo Signorile can be reached at [www.signorile.com](http://www.signorile.com)