by Molly Ivors
Just finished reading the article about press coverage of the 2000 race in the new Vanity Fair, and I have to warn you, though it's not news, it will infuriate you beyond words.
Essentially, it's the story we already knew about how the kewl kids of the DC press corps, especially Katharine Seelye of the NYTimes and Ceci Connolly of the Washington Post, the bitchiest pair of Heathers on the planet, decided that Bush was an affable charmer and Gore a stuffed shirt, and what they did about it. They pushed the meme that Gore was a serial liar, about Love Story (turns out that one's true), being an early supporter of the internets (also true), and "discovering Love Canal" (misquoted). And they never corrected themselves. In fact, when a high school student who was at the "Love Canal" gaffe speech ran into one of the reporters and noted that they had misquoted him, the reporter was, shall we say, cool.
But the extreme nastiness from Maureen Dowd puts all of them to shame.
Maureen Dowd boiled the choice between Gore and Bush down to that between the "pious smarty-pants" and the "amiable idler," and made it perfectly clear which of the presidential candidates had a better chance of getting a date. "Al Gore is desperate to get chicks," she said in her column. "Married chicks. Single chicks. Old chicks. Young chicks. If he doesn't stop turning off women, he'll never be president."
"I bet he is in a room somewhere right now playing Barry White CDs and struggling to get mellow," she wrote in another.
..........
Dowd wrote in one column that "Al Gore is so feminized and diversified and ecologically correct, he's practically lactating." In another, referring to his consideration of putting a Webcam in the Oval Office, she wrote, "I have zero desire to see President Gore round the clock, putting comely interns to sleep with charts and lectures on gaseous reduction."
Maureen Dowd is the sort of woman who would let her tomcat boyfriend fuck her without a condom and then whine that she got the clap.
And Margaret "Why Won't Fred Thompson Return My Calls" Carlson was no better, just more honest:
As Time magazine's Margaret Carlson admitted to Don Imus at the time, "You can actually disprove some of what Bush is saying if you really get into the weeds and get out your calculator, or look at his record in Texas. But it's really easy, and it's fun to disprove Al Gore. As sport, and as our enterprise, Gore coming up with another whopper is greatly entertaining to us."
I note here, to my dismay, that all of these are female reporters, and indeed, though the author Evgenia Peretz, daughter of Martin, does quote a few male pundits such as Tweetybird Matthews and Broderella, most of this vitriol did seem to be the work of female reporters.
I have a couple of theories about this. One, in an attempt to prove that they could play ball with the big boys, they dug in and tried to out-tough each other. However, they didn't do this to Bush, for unclear reasons. Two, Gore was Old News--he'd been around forever, and here was this new person. Why a responsible journalist would not see that as an opportunity to investigate, I don't know. But they didn't. They just turned on the taps in one direction and left the other more or less perfectly dry.
Seelye is unrepentant, and Connolly went to work for Fox in the days after the election, so I don't think there's much question about where her heart lies. Carlson is the real angry girlfriend of Swamp Thing Thompson, and MoDo has a terminal case of the trivials.
For the sake of my gender, can we please get Christiane Amanpour a major news gig? Because we're not all giggly dopes. Kthnxbai.
Below:The DC press corps fucks up another election.
