Re: Media myths (Was Townsend)

[Donna Halper <dlh@donnahalper.com>]

Before this deteriorates into the anti- and pro- Gore factions, I am fairly 
neutral in the matter, but because I train journalists, objectivity is 
important to me.  Please consider that the Boston Globe ran an article 
about a New Hampshire teacher whose students found more than 10 separate 
cases of various newspapers attributed quotes to Gore that he never 
said:  the class had an assignment that was not just about Gore, but 
rather, it was a civics class that was studying whether reporters quote 
people accurately, and when they traced transcripts and tapes of speeches 
and compared them with newspaper accounts, they found many misquotes. I 
have the article and the citation.  There is also an excellent article in 
the Washington Monthly, a well-respected political magazine that slants 
left on some issues and right on others, but which found similar examples 
of press distortions regarding candidates.  They did an interesting cover 
story about the press misquotes of Gore called "He's No Pinocchio" in their 
April 2000 issue... Like it or not, many of the quotes attributed to Gore 
are in the category of urban legend.  From speeches I have heard, he said 
he was the first senator to have a web page (which I believe he was) and he 
said he felt that he was the only senator at that time who was familiar 
with what was going on in cyberspace (and like him or not, he was ahead of 
most of congress in his interest in the internet-- but he didn't say he 
invented it, as far as I have heard or read... he said he FELT like he had 
DISCOVERED something that nobody else knew about... and back in the late 
80s, that may have been true, given how slow congress was to adapt to new 
technologies...)  But for our Republican friends on the list, the same 
habit of misquotes and pseudo-quotes can be said about statements 
attributed to Bush the daddy and Bush the son, Ronald Reagan, and numerous 
others.   Sloppy journalism is not just a Democratic complaint.  I really 
recommend checking www.snopes.com to see the urban legends about various 
famous people...