AL 2.0

Ezra Klein takes a flyover of Al Gore’s new world. The political speculation is interesting, if still too fluid to interpret. But what’s really compelling is that Gore seems to be—authentically, not as a positioning stunt—firmly planted on the real edge of new media. He’s using the Web and its interactive toolkit to craft a political communication strategy that gives more control to the independent source and a greater voice to the participant audience.

… Gore laced into the state of the media, lamenting the “systematic decay of the public forum,” and echoing Walter Lippmann’s belief that the propaganda emanating from the press corps was rendering America’s “dogma of democracy” void. Journalism, Gore said, had grown “dysfunctional,” and now “fails to inform the people.”

The speech wasn’t just an isolated blast aimed at wresting some headlines or settling some scores. Gore has long been quietly obsessed with excising the media from the politician-public relationship. That’s been the unifying aim of all his seemingly disconnected ventures since returning to the public eye: a determination to evade, and eventually end, the media’s stranglehold on political communication. Yet few seem to have noticed this campaign, with most observers too caught up in Gore’s old storylines to recognize his new efforts.

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So when he taught a class at Columbia’s School of Journalism, the conventional wisdom held that Al Gore was becoming the boring professor he was always meant to be. When he began distributing his speeches through MoveOn.org, the pundits intoned that he was merely proving himself the wild-eyed liberal they’d always suspected he was. When he started the Gen-Y oriented Current TV, the commentators snickered at his pathetic attempts to become cool. And when he endorsed Howard Dean for president, political watchers quickly associated Dean’s downfall with Gore’s reverse-Midas touch, laughing as Al lost another one.

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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.

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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 — 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.”

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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.”

These clips sound more strident than the article shows him to be. Read the whole thing, as they say. The main point I wanted to bring up is that Gore could have done a lot of things after 2000 and what he chose to do was to get into some new and critical terrain. Current could do for public discourse what YouTube is doing for teenage karaoke clips. In fact, both are part of the same discursive impulse and YouTube, being for the moment more “democratic”, could just as easily be the channel for the new millennial politics. On the other hand, we’re not giving up editorial just because we’re online (not completely, anyway), so Current may just do a different but complementary thing. Certainly, they’re two expressions of the same idea.

It may be, again, that Gore is too far out ahead of his time. But the more people see of him outside the Kabuki drama of The Campaign Show, the more they like him. (The opposite appears to be true for Gore’s erstwhile opponent.) In any event, he’s out front in the mediasphere and always worth watching.

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