Gore on being Gored

Listen: Al Gore addresses The Media Center's We Media conference at AP headquarters in NY (48 min, 20 MB MP3).

Well, talk about an Al Gore convergence today. Al gave a speech this morning about the decline of the media as independent arbiters of our public dialog. Full transcript worth reading at TPMCafe, but here's a central point, which echoes critiques I have made elsewhere:

The news divisions - which used to be seen as serving a public interest and were subsidized by the rest of the network - are now seen as profit centers designed to generate revenue and, more importantly, to advance the larger agenda of the corporation of which they are a small part. They have fewer reporters, fewer stories, smaller budgets, less travel, fewer bureaus, less independent judgment, more vulnerability to influence by management, and more dependence on government sources and canned public relations hand-outs. This tragedy is compounded by the ironic fact that this generation of journalists is the best trained and most highly skilled in the history of their profession. But they are usually not allowed to do the job they have been trained to do.
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Clearly, the purpose of television news is no longer to inform the American people or serve the public interest. It is to "glue eyeballs to the screen" in order to build ratings and sell advertising. If you have any doubt, just look at what's on: The Robert Blake trial. The Laci Peterson tragedy. The Michael Jackson trial. The Runaway Bride. The search in Aruba. The latest twist in various celebrity couplings, and on and on and on.

And more importantly, notice what is not on: the global climate crisis, the nation's fiscal catastrophe, the hollowing out of America's industrial base, and a long list of other serious public questions that need to be addressed by the American people.
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This was the point made by Jon Stewart, the brilliant host of "The Daily Show," when he visited CNN's "Crossfire": there should be a distinction between news and entertainment.

As I just mentioned, Gore lost the debate spin, but not the debates themselves.

I wonder. Is Gore positioning himself for a run in 08? We wont know for sure until after the 06 elections, so I have at least a year of speculation :)