Saturday, June 02, 2007

"The Assault on Reason" by Al Gore

I haven't read it but here's a review in the NYT--overwhelmingly positive. Lots of good Amazon reviews here. Good Guardian review here. Gay conservative tool Andrew Sullivan bashes Gore and his book here. I found it odd that he did so in a post about a recurrence in media Gore-bashing.

I'll never forget the outrage I felt as the mainstream media (except Knight-Ridder, now McClatchy) went about mercilessly attacking Gore during the 2000 campaign--and he still won! (That's when I started reading blogs (e.g., The Daily Howler).) If anybody is entitled to settle a score, it's Gore.

He had this right:

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 went ahead and ordered the book.

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