The Soap Box

I want to start at the end and say I do not believe Al Gore should run for president again in 2008, or probably ever. The fact is, the man really just isn’t a great politician. There’s a reason his campaign was hijacked by consultants in 2000 who convinced him to run a campaign centered around earthtone sportscoats and middle-aged makeout sessions on national television: It’s because Al Gore has an uncanny ability to make issues unbearable with a laundry list of esoteric facts.

Essentially, Vice President Gore does exactly that in the new documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. The film turns out not to be unbearable precisely because it is a film, not a candidate’s debate. Gore wants to impart to you every interesting detail about global warming because he is passionate about it. And though the film is chock full of charts and graphs and big-sounding words, everyone knows what to expect walking into the theatre and everyone manages to learn quite a bit. Something Americans are acutely unwilling to tolerate from their elected officials.

That is Al Gore’s strength. For those willing to listen, the man can teach you everything you need to know about an issue. He’s an informed electorate-making machine the likes of which is truly unparalleled in our country. So long as he is doing what he’s doing now, rather than trying to convince a half-concious country to like him, the man truly is a national treasure. (As an aside, I don’t want to see him become president, but Gore would make the best EPA Administrator this country has ever seen.)

There is a single truth on display in Gore’s movie that stands out above all of the rest, but not because he emphasizes it. In fact, it is really given tangential treatment compared to all of the scientific data he imparts. Despite the short-shrift it’s given in the movie, this truth is truly the crux of the matter; it is the truth around which the entire global warming issue revolves.

Gore tells us that some scientists performed a survey of peer-reviewed scientific papers on global warming which unconvered that not a single one of those scholarly works challenged the consensus that the earth is warming and that human behavior is causing it. A similar survey of popular media stories about global warming, however, found that over fifty percent of those stories suggested that there is some debate concerning two points. Clearly, the media was not reflecting the scientific reality while it was reporting on a scientific phenomenon. The news stories were about politics.

The media is the single reason why our environmental policy is the way it is. If there was no doubt among the American public that we are indeed destroying the environment upon which we rely for survival, we would not countenance such changes in policy as withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocols (or Gov. Romney of Massachusetts backing out of a similar environmental pact between the New England states, as he did recently). Because science is extremely complicated, and because the American public don’t enjoy listening to smart people lecturing at them, we rely on the media to filter scientific facts in a reliable and at least slightly entertaining way.

So why does the media tells us that there is debate about global warming when not a single scientist ever said anything of the sort? Politics, of course. But it’s not enough just to say politics, or to say that there is money to be made. The global warming “debate” is a product of the most insidious fraud perpetrated on the American people in decades, and to disasterous effect: The concerted effort by the political right to create the myth of the liberal media.

The role of the media - once upon a time - was to unconver and report on the truth. Courageous reporters would investigate an issue and stand up to demagogues, protecting the American people from bad policy devised for the benefit of a few at the expense of the many, and sold to the public through lies. Particularly with respect to quantifiable matters such as science, the role of the media was to report on the facts, not the spin. But so effective has the right been at discrediting media institutions by crying bias that even our greatest institutions are scared to death of being labeled as liberal. The result is that the spin has become the story - just report on what they said rather than whether it’s true. Fact checking has become that gameshow-esque portion of the news broadcast where the intrepid reporter doles out equal helpings of “that’s not exactly true” to each side like a mother administering spankings following a fight which each child insists the other started. It is as if the media has thrown up its hands, concluding that politicians lie and that’s just the way it is, so they might as well make it entertaining and make a few bucks off of it. Meanwhile, the people no longer have any means for deciding what is good policy and what is bad; everything is good policy, depending on who you ask.

The country is no longer safe from demagogues, and policy gets to be made by the best snake oil salesman in Washington. That’s why fuel efficiency standards for cars in the United States are abysmally low; that’s why the United States is no longer a signatory to the Kyoto Protocols; that’s why instead of reducing our dependence on foreign oil by simply using less oil, we are on the verge of completely destroying a large portion of what’s left of the wildlands in Alaska for a pittance of oil that won’t reduce the cost of it or our dependence upon it.

And that’s why we need Al Gore not to run for president in 2008. The truth is, no matter who takes over in the oval office in January of 2009 - Republican or Democrat - energy consumption in the United States will not be drastically reduced unless we begin getting some truth from our media once again. More than we need a competent president or campaign finance reform, we need media reform in this country. We need a revival of standards of journalistic integrity. We just need a few investigative reporters again whose job it is to report on the truth that the media isn’t even looking for. We need Al Gore to kick Katie Couric to the curb and succeed Dan Rather as anchor of the evening news. We need him to keep bringing us the truth, and to get others to start doing the same.

The American people are missing out on a lot of truth, and that is where every fight must begin.