assault on reality
Eric (What Liberal Media?) Alterman’s two-part piece (here at The Nation and here at HuffPo) on media reactions to Al Gore’s book The Assault on Reason—or, as he puts it, “mainstream media's continuing character assassination campaign against Al Gore”—following their similar behavior in the 2000 election:
…the media made Al Gore out to be a liar because so many reporters chose to misreport his remarks or take them out of context. To top it off, they made a joke of their maliciousness, mocking Gore for alleged mendacities that were largely the results of their carelessness and deliberate misrepresentation.
Andrew Ferguson of the conservative Weekly Standard even claimed that Gore didn’t footnote his book, and asked rhetorically: “I'd love to know where he found the scary quote from Abraham Lincoln that he uses on page 88.” Tom Schaller at Tapped replied:
Well, Mr. Ferguson, the answer to that is quite easily to be found on p. 282 of the book where, in the endnotes, Gore provides the citation. (The Lincoln Encyclopedia, Macmillan: 1950, Andrew Ward, ed., page 40.) Is Ferguson so manipulative that he is using the endnote/footnote difference to mislead the readers into believing there is no sourcing whatsoever in Gore's book? Or is Ferguson so damn lazy he didn't even bother to notice that Gore's book includes endnotes?
I wouldn’t characterize it as an either/or situation; the media in general are both too lazy to read carefully and too manipulative to admit this to their audiences.