If that wasn’t enough to take, King actually asked Gore, “[W]ould you join with former President Carter in saying…that this is the worst administration foreign policy-wise ever?”
I kid you not.
But, before we get there, the first Gore gushing came right at the beginning of the show (h/t Gary Hall):
Video (1:25): Real (2.30 MB) or Windows (2.61), plus MP3 (1.25 MB).
LARRY KING, HOST: Tonight, Al Gore. Some say he's helping save the planet. Now they want him to save the nation and run for president. What would it take for him to say yes?
No liberal bias there.
Yet, a few moments later, this:
KING: All right. As a strong critic to the administration, would you join with former President Carter in saying this -- he later retracted it somewhat, that this is the worst administration foreign policy-wise ever?
GORE: Well, as I was telling somebody the other day, I have recently begun to fear that I'm losing my objectivity where Bush and Cheney are concerned. So I'm not sure that I'm the best witness for whether or not his presidency is the worst or the -- nearly the worst. I didn't vote for him. I didn't think he should be president.
But that won't come as a surprise.
KING: Are you surprised that President Carter went that far?
GORE: Hmm, you know, he has earned the right to just say what he thinks and let it -- let the chips fall where they will. He always expresses his own candid opinions. And as to whether or not he later decided that was a breach of some kind of unwritten protocol between former presidents and presidents, unfortunately, I'm not intimately familiar with those rules of protocol.
KING: Former presidents have often criticized presidents. So it goes back in history, goes back a long way, as presidents do. I mean, there is no...
(CROSSTALK)
GORE: You know, I think in recent decades, there has probably been less of that. But you know, I'm for him saying whatever he wants to.
How marvelous of the two of them, don’t you agree?
Yet, maybe even more disgraceful, after demonstrating such obviously deplorable bias, King asked, "What's your rap on the media in this 'Assault on Reason'?" That set up the following laughable exchange:
GORE: Well, I think that all of us are part of the problem and part of the solution. I think that democracy is a conversation and a lot of that conversation is carried by the media. And when television replaced newspapers as the dominant medium -- and television is still completely dominant, notwithstanding the rise and growing strength of the Internet, there were some fundamental changes.
And one of them, Larry, your show is a prominent exception because when you have entertainment-oriented programs, they are sort of clearly indicated as such. But in a lot of the news media, the line between entertainment and news is now very blurred, and a lot of news organizations feel the need to run polls and conduct focus groups the same as politicians now.And so we get a lot more of Anna Nicole Smith's funeral arrangements and Paris Hilton's legal battles on her jail term than we get about how we can solve the climate crisis and how we can get our troops out of this civil war they are trapped in, in Iraq.
And we have this huge onslaught of trivialities and four-and-a- half hours a day is the average amount of time Americans watch television. And so much of it is just sort of mind-deadening. And you know what I'm talking about. And that line between entertainment and news is really gone now in many cases.
KING: Are you a critic of the FOX News Channel, which some people think is more towards the right?GORE: Well, yes, but this is not so much about that particular phenomenon. You know, it used to be that newspapers in America had a point of view that was identifiable.
KING: On the editorial page.
GORE: No.
KING: Sometimes on the front page.
GORE: Well, in earlier times, it was all oriented towards a point of view. And then it shifted. And television was that way, too. It tried to be objective. But with the advent of cable news, it opened up the opportunity for the kind of approach that you're talking about here.And I think that there is a difference between serving the public interest standard of facilitating the conversation of democracy. And that's one of the obligations I think that broadcasters ought to recognize.
Extraordinary. So, it used to be that newspapers were:
all oriented towards a point of view...And television was that way, too. It tried to be objective. But with the advent of cable news, it opened up the opportunity for the kind of approach that you're talking about here.
And I think that there is a difference between serving the public interest standard of facilitating the conversation of democracy.
Absolutely amazing. So, what Gore was saying here is that when the media were just oriented toward one point of view, namely, the left, they were actually trying to be objective. Yet, with the advent of cable news -- likely more specifically Fox News -- a shift occurred which no longer served "the public interest standard of facilitating the conversation of democracy."
In other words, as long as media were biased exclusively towards a liberal point of view, they were demonstrating objectivity. Yet, once they began presenting both sides of the argument, the public interest was no longer being served, and the conversation of democracy failed.
Any questions about what liberals believe objectivity in the media to be, and why they want to reimplement the Fairness Doctrine to quash all opposing views in the name of impartiality?
For those that can take it, the full transcript is available here.
