The New Assault on Al Gore

By Robert Parry
June 5, 2007

An irony about Al Gore’s new book, The Assault on Reason, is that the former Vice President blames TV much more than the print media for America’s drift into the world of the irrational.

Yet, while author Gore has encountered mostly respectful interviews on TV, his book has been savaged by major newspapers and print reviewers, often distorting the contents and resurrecting one of the favorite press themes of Campaign 2000, that Gore is an obnoxious pedant.

Starting the ball rolling was a dismissively brief two-column review in the Washington Post’s Book World on May 27, largely ignoring what the book said while making clear that the Inside-the-Beltway hostility toward Gore endures.

“Al Gore possesses a skill that no other American politician can match – or would want to,” wrote Washington Post reviewer Alan Ehrenhalt. “He has a consistent ability to express fundamentally reasonable sentiments – often important ones – in ways that annoy the maximum possible number of people.”