All this disdain for Gore was back with a vengeance after his testimony week before last. It's no wonder he doesn't want "run" for president again.
By Robert Parry
Thursday 22 March 2007
When historians sort out what happened to the United States at the start of the 21st Century, one of the mysteries may be why the national press corps ganged up like school-yard bullies against a well-qualified Democratic presidential candidate while giving his dimwitted Republican opponent virtually a free pass..
How could major news organizations, like The New York Times and The Washington Post, have behaved so irresponsibly as to spread falsehoods and exaggerations to tear down then-Vice President Al Gore - ironically while the newspapers were berating him for supposedly lying and exaggerating?
In a modern information age, these historians might ask, how could an apocryphal quote like Gore claiming to have "invented the Internet" been allowed to define a leading political figure much as the made-up quote "let them eat cake" was exploited by French propagandists to undermine Marie Antoinette two centuries earlier?
Why did the U.S. news media continue ridiculing Gore in 2002 when he was one of the most prominent Americans to warn that George W. Bush's radical policy of preemptive war was leading the nation into a disaster in Iraq?
Arguably, those violations of journalistic principles at leading U.S. news organizations, in applying double standards to Gore and Bush, altered the course of American history and set the nation on a very dangerous course.
Now, Gore has reemerged in Washington appealing to his former colleagues in the House and Senate to act urgently on the threat from global warming.
In the initial press coverage of Gore's return to Capitol Hill, there remains a touch of the old mocking tone, such as The New York Times' front-page article describing Gore as "a heartbreak loser turned Oscar boasting Nobel hopeful globe-trotting multimillionaire pop culture eminence," but not nearly the level of open disdain shown in Campaign 2000.
In early 2000, we published a story about that hostility and how it changed the dynamic of that crucial presidential race. We noted that "to read the major newspapers and to watch the TV pundit shows, one can't avoid the impression that many in the national press have decided that Vice President Al Gore is unfit to be elected the next President of the United States."
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/032207I.shtml