Our Lazy Useless American Press

Lead article in Salon.com by Eric Boehlert, and it's dead-on. It underscores our post below it on how the press will do the White House's bidding to destroy the Dems over useless crap while BushCo is destroying the rest of the country.

Remember how Gore was dogged in the press by often phony, Republican-crafted stories about how he couldn't be trusted? A classic case in point was the "Gore invented the Internet" story. The facts were simple: In March 1999 Gore gave an interview to CNN in which he artlessly said, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." He was referring to his landmark "information superhighway" speech, as well as his well-known leadership in delivering key government funding to help nurture the Net in the '80s and early '90s. For a few days Gore's CNN comments were ignored in the 24-hour news cycle. Then the RNC issued a press release mocking Gore's statement, and soon the urban legend about Gore having claimed to invent the sprawling Internet took root in the political landscape. Almost five years later, even though it's been relentlessly debunked, it's a weed that can't be killed. Just last month it bloomed again when Gore endorsed the Internet-savvy Dean, and Joe Klein, Clarence Page, Jeff Greenfield, and Tim Russert all reached back and dug it up for public consumption. Lazy media habits die hard.

Today, the parallels between the Dean and Gore press coverage are impossible to miss. There's the charge Dean is constantly trying to "reinvent" himself, which Gore was accused of in 2000. That Dean is "angry"; Gore was tagged a "savage campaigner" during the primaries. There's the often nit-picking obsession with the "gaffes" that supposedly bedevil Dean; for Gore the problem was "exaggerations."

New York Times columnist David Brooks recently ridiculed Dean for beginning "a sentence with, 'Us rural people ...' Dean grew up on Park Avenue and in East Hampton. If he's a rural person, I'm the Queen of Sheba." Somebody might want to tell Brooks (or his editor) that Dean has spent half his life living in Vermont, and his wife still practices family medicine in the tiny town of Shelburne (pop: 6,618). Meanwhile, of course, the Andover, Yale and Harvard-educated Bush's claim to a pure Texas pedigree is rarely questioned.

And instead of schmoozing reporters on the campaign trail and handing out playground-type nicknames the way Bush did in 2000, Dean treats them professionally, but pushes back when he thinks they're wrong.

Perhaps not surprisingly, it's the Washington Post -- particularly its editorial and Op-Ed pages, which double as the house organ of the D.C. establishment -- that has taken the lead role in deriding the surging outsider. But the rest of the press also seems eager to play along with the established, critical Dean narratives.