The New New Gore

American Prospect: The New And Improved Al Gore

(The American Prospect)  Gore's interest in communicative technology and media dates back at least to the late 1960s, when he was attending Harvard and, under the direction of presidential historian Richard Neustadt, wrote his thesis on television's relationship to the presidency. It continued when he enlisted in Vietnam as an army journalist and deepened when, on returning, he signed up with his hometown paper, The Tennessean, where he remained for four and a half years, breaking a corruption scandal that resulted in the arrest of two city council members. He has often mused that if he had not assumed dynastic responsibilities and followed his father's footsteps into politics, he would've enjoyed being a journalist.

It's fitting, then, that after some hanging chads lynched his political ambitions, he returned to his roots, accepting a post at Columbia's journalism school to teach about the intersection between journalism, his first career, and the Internet, his longstanding obsession. The class, which began in Spring 2001, was entitled "Covering National Affairs in an Information Age." Gore's first lecture engaged objectivity itself, challenging the journalistic trope that fairness resides in controversy and an article has to represent all sides &3151 no matter how marginal — equally. Instead, Gore argued that the journalistic impulse to exalt even the most fringe views to parity in order to furnish opposing perspectives is harmful to basic accuracy. This didn't sit well with more than a few of the wannabe reporters in the class, many of whom were aghast at the suggestion that the media should attempt to actually mediate between truth and spin. As Josh Bearman, a student in that class and now an editor at the LA Weekly, recalls it, "He stood up there challenging the entire dogma of the journalism school. First semester, you learned that objectivity was emperor, then Gore came in and told you it had no clothes."

And along with that backlash, the old anti-intellectualism Gore experienced in 2000 made a reappearance. As Bearman tells it, "He knew more than everyone in the room. So the class basically turned against him because he was smarter than they were, and they didn't like that. We witnessed exactly what had happened on the campaign plane in the year prior." Gore did not return to teach the class in 2002.

It's possible, though, that the class taught something to Gore, because not long after that he began actively seeking to evade the media. On August 7, 2003, Gore headed to New York University to offer one of his first major speeches since his concession address; it was a notably prescient condemnation of the Bush administration's later bellicosity and overreach. But more visionary than the content was the distribution method: the speech was Gore's first — but not his last — offered under the auspices of the online-activism powerhouse MoveOn.org, an alliance that granted Gore a direct conduit to millions of engaged liberal activists nationwide.

"I know the word fell out of favor after the dot-com collapse," mused Wes Boyd, founder of MoveOn.org, "but he's doing disintermediation. He contacted us in the summer of 2003, said he wanted to give a speech, and was wondering if we'd like to sponsor it. What we lend to it is some of that disintermediation."

Disintermediation is a big word for a type of subtraction, the sort that excludes the middleman (the "mediator"). As a dot-com term, it described producers selling directly to customers rather than working through established retail channels. In Gore's case, it describes a public figure distributing his words directly to the public rather than working through established media outlets.

The reason Gore sought this out, as former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt, Gore's friend since 1961, told me, is that "Gore wants to make change, not be part of the distortive, stifling process of the mainstream media." Speaking into the cameras, the former VP had learned, was like talking into one of those gag gift bullhorns — what came out had little relation to what went in. "Gore's own view," says Hundt, "is that he sighed noisily in the debate and used the wrong telephone line to ask for money and the media said these are momentous events. Meanwhile, they ignore global warming and the failure to catch Osama and the destruction of the safety net."

So Gore sought a way to bypass the filter. Every time he gives a speech under MoveOn's auspices, a guaranteed 3 million MoveOn members get the address blasted directly in their inboxes, where it can be read in full. From there, the speech gets e-mailed around, promoted on the blogs, passed from friend to neighbor — what tech types call "viral marketing." At no point in this process does a news editor or television producer decide which sound bites will be emphasized for ratings. MoveOn allows him to speak on his own terms and individuals to distribute his speeches on theirs. It's Gore Unplugged, and everyone's got a ticket.

If the Internet is reinventing Gore, though, Gore is using its lessons to reinvent television. His October 2005 speech to the We Media conference was a tour de force, ranging from Johannes Gutenberg to Thomas Paine, Walter Lippmann to John Kenneth Galbraith, the historian Henry Steele Commager to the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas. Gore was a know-it-all, and he didn't care if they knew it too. He blasted the media for accepting "fewer reporters, fewer stories, smaller budgets, less travel, fewer bureaus, less independent judgment, more vulnerability to influence by management, and more dependence on government sources and canned public relations hand-outs," for chasing sensationalism and conflict, for becoming "dumbed-down and tarted-up." He lamented that "the inherent value or validity of political propositions put forward by candidates for office is now largely irrelevant compared to the advertising campaigns that shape the perceptions of voters." But most of all, he decried television's unidirectionality. "[A]long with my partner, Joel Hyatt, I am trying to work within the medium of television to recreate a multi-way conversation that includes individuals and operates according to a meritocracy of ideas."