Poor Al Gore. He can't win for losing. In the era of the permanent campaign, politicians are always fair game for the press. While Dubya insulates himself behind the machinery and charm offensive of the White House spin machine, the former vice president has been stripped of his office and "team" only to become, once again, fresh meat for the media wolf pack.

How ironic that the defeated "victorious" Democratic presidential candidate would choose after so many years in government to teach journalism, not politics. I guess he has learned the hard way who really has the power to set the political agenda. Equally ironic is that he should choose to make a low-profile, off-the-record debut as an adjunct professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in the heart of media-crazed New York City. Did he really think he would just blend into the woodwork of academe?

In one sense, Al has taken up my old job, since I was an adjunct professor there myself a year ago and know the place well. (Needless to say, I encountered no similar hoopla. In fact, no one much cared in the faculty or student body, and certainly not in the media at large, perhaps because I was teaching about the power of the media industry, a subject that gets in the media all too rarely.) If, however, there had been media requests to monitor the class, I would have closed my doors to reporters, too. In my view, most journalism classes, including Gore's, should be off the record. Why? How else to get him to speak in sound bite–free sentences and tell the truth about the role of the media in modern politics? Dean Tom Goldstein put it well, before the school seemed to backtrack: "You want freedom of discussion in a classroom, where people say a lot of things and want to be free to say it without reading about it the next day." But that was not to be. Journalists, including New York Post columnist Steve "Mad Dog" Dunleavy, a well-known Gore-bashing scribbler, staged a noisy siege at the journalism school. The circus became a textbook illustration of the problem at hand. (After much criticism, the next day Columbia lifted its gag order on students talking publicly about the lecture, although restrictions on press coverage remained. Columbia's statement here)

As the spirit of academic freedom clashed with the demands of press freedom, students and teachers debated how public this exercise in the merger of politics and media should be. According to a New York Times account, reporters barred from Gore's first post-campaign lecture ended up doing what they often do: interviewing each other and trying to bribe students to tell them what Al had to say.

Perhaps that's how the Times found out and later revealed that, in his lecture, Gore was critical of "derivative news, like journalists' speculations about politicians' methods, motives and electoral chances." Sounds like Gore was finally offering some commentary on the media coverage of an election that is to become the subject of a February 14^th Congressional hearing. Considering the marriage between the media industry and politics, don't expect more than smoke and mirrors, as the networks promise not to repeat the debacle of Election 2000. Already their news divisions have pledged reform, if only to contain the backlash against their own credibility.

Arrogant Journalists, Media-Shy Politicos
Sanctimonious denunciations of Gore for not turning his class into a press conference underscored the arrogance of media that are increasingly acknowledging major mistakes during the election — humbling themselves somewhat now that their credibility has been tarnished.

We American reporters tend to wrap ourselves in the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of the press as if it guarantees whatever license we seek. And when we are rejected or ejected from any venue, especially when a journalism school bars journalists, we scream bloody murder. It reminds me of a line in Jeffrey Toobin's book "A Vast Conspiracy," on the Clinton sex scandal. In writing about the House managers who were mismanaging the failed impeachment of President Clinton, he says: "The more unpopular they became, the more certain they became of their rectitude. Indeed, in a curious way, some of the managers seemed to take repudiation as proof of their righteousness."

No journalist is more reptilian in this regard, or symbolic of the devolution of the trade, than the aforementioned Steve Dunleavy, who led the charge of the righteous reporters at Columbia against the audacity of Gore's refusal to perform in front of them. As a hard-drinking, fast-talking Aussie who has been Rupert Murdoch's attack dog for a generation, he has become a folk hero in some circles as the poster boy of jaundiced tabloid journalism. (He was caricatured by Oliver Stone in the movie "Natural Born Killers.") His column drips with extreme right-wing venom, and, sure enough, he was the ringleader up at the J-School, hectoring anyone who would listen about — what else? — freedom of the press (i.e., his right to do whatever he wanted). His "indignation at the press's exclusion could be measured by the rhetoric he used," reported the Times, which was too genteel to tell us the content of his rant.

Dunleavy's column tells you more than you want to know about his mindset. Headline: "Hypocrites triumph at free speech temple." He raves on entertainingly: "You are listening to Gore, a person who mugs Buddhist nuns for money, a political grifter who deals from the bottom of the deck ... What a freaking disgrace." Thanks, Steve, for being so predictably vicious, but how do you really feel about Gore as a teacher of journalism?

Parenthetically, I first met the dreaded Dunleavy in action while covering the Son of Sam serial-killer investigation that forced New Yorkers to live in fear during the summers of 1976 and '77. At the time, in an attempt to cool the situation, the New York police were not making any statements. Dunleavy wanted to heat it up, asking loudly if they would confirm or deny that their suspect was black or Puerto Rican, thus injecting a racial dimension into a case that at that point had none. When the cops broke their silence to deny it, Dunleavy had his first "exclusive." The police would later arrest and convict a deranged white man, David Berkowitz, for the crimes.

Dunleavy was also one of many right-wing media voices who beat the drums to get the election "over with" and "move on" — an intimidating sentiment that helped insure that all the votes were not counted. Now, led by the Miami Herald, newspapers are staging their own recounts. Already one such recount, by The Washington Post, discovered that Gore was the real winner in Florida, or as some prefer, "Fraudia." Some Democrats are now wearing "Re-elect Al Gore" pins. (For more on the media recount, see our Hot Stories page.)

Contrition, Please
What I would have liked to see was a bit more post-election contrition by the press corps in the aftermath of a study published by CNN. "Television interfered with the electoral process and the election result," it concluded. "In our opinion, that constitutes an abuse of power, if unintentionally so, by CNN and by all [italics mine] the mainstream television news operations." Protests are being organized against CNN. A candlelight vigil sponsored by a coalition called Project CNN at CNN headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, has been planned for Saturday, April 7, with at least 50 grassroots activist groups already signed on as cosponsors.

Many new citizen groups are forming nationwide to continue to press for electoral change, like Citizens for Legitimate Government in Florida and Voters Organized Towards Equality (VOTE) in New York. They are helping to channel the considerable outrage that is festering in the aftermath of the election, but which you only rarely read about in the press.

When you have major media organizations admitting they contributed to misinforming the public during the election, you have considerable grist for many more media courses. It so happens that I've just co-edited (with Media Tenor's Roland Schatz) "Hail to the Thief," a book of MediaChannel election coverage (more information here) that argues that if the election of 2000 was in fact stolen, the media were accessories to and enablers of the crime. I am sending Gore a copy in hopes of getting his thoughts on how to challenge the pernicious power of our growing "mediaocracy," the outgrowth of a merger between media and politics.

From my introduction:

"The counting and undercounting of the election ballots, the mistaken votes and bizarre 'overvotes,' was a scandal seen around the world. Rarely seen and poorly covered in the media was another scandal within that scandal — the role played by the media themselves. In the book, we argue that one can only understand what happened in the election of 2000 by understanding the role, function and performance of the media, which covered and mis-covered it.

"That scandal was not a crude conspiracy, nor is it simply an accidental occurrence. Its roots can be found in a corporate media environment that had been changing for years, as well as in the increasing corporatization of politics itself. It reflects a growing symbiotic relationship between increasingly interlocking media and political elites. Together they form a powerful, interdependent system in which overt ideology and shared world views mask more covert subservience to other agendas. Together these two forces form a Mediaocracy, a political system tethered to a media system. ...

"This coverage of the media coverage tells a story that the media itself does not. It is the story of how Big Media got into bed with Big Politics, of how it consistently under-informed the voting public and turned off large segments of the electorate, discouraging younger voters. By monitoring media choices, framing and filtering, by critiquing programming, pressures and news routines, MediaChannel.org affiliates reveal a clear pattern of how news organizations undermined a fair election and, in the process, assisted in the theft of an election from the people themselves. Their approach, in the view of many of the writers in these pages, devalues democracy.

"So, if something was 'stolen' in the 2000 election, it was the very idea of a fair and democratic electoral process, 'robbed' from the American people — not just one political office, albeit the presidency.

"According to survey researcher Andrew Kohut, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review [published in the very building hosting Gore's class], the public was asked to grade the media's contribution in 2000. Just 28 percent gave grades of A or B for election coverage. Four in 10 respondents (38 percent) offered up a failing grade, a D or an F. Significantly, this same public disdain for the media was registered after prior elections. Clearly, media chiefs did not chose to hear what the public thought and did little to respond to earlier calls for internal reforms. So much for the media system 'giving the public what it wants.' "

I hope that the kids at Columbia, and other media students and consumers worldwide, will get a chance to be exposed to and discuss this critique with Al Gore and others who are complicit in the decline of democracy. It is fascinating to see Gore drawn to a journalism classroom in a tacit admission that that is where the real explanations are to be found about why he lost and what must be done to improve media quality if democracy itself is to be saved.

— Danny Schechter is the executive editor of MediaChannel and the author of "News Dissector" (Electronpress.com) and "Falun Gong's Challenge to China" (Akashicbooks.com).

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