Right-wing echo chamber promotes doctored and deceptive audio clip of Al Gore.
Earlier this week, the Business & Media Institute (BMI) – a right-wing front group founded by Brent Bozell – spliced and doctored an NPR interview of Al Gore in order to allege that Gore said something which he did not. The organization published a false headline which blared that Gore called the Myanmar cyclone a “consequence” of global warming. Drudge promoted it on his site.
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But in the NPR interview, Gore asserted that melting polar ice caps — not cyclones — were a “consequence” of global warming (which is unequivocally due to global warming). BMI inverted Gore’s comments to make it seem like his remarks about the cyclones followed from his remarks about “the consequences of global warming.” Yesterday, Fox News promoted the doctored clip to make the same false allegations about what Gore actually said.
Indeed, the truth-challenged folks at Faux News offer us this blaring headline:
Al Gore Blames Global Warming for Myanmar Cyclone
Brent Bozell is a smear campaign veteran (for more on Bozell, read here). But Gore has been a target of all sorts of smear campaigns: remember when the Tennessee Center for Policy Research made the shocking allegation that the Gores actually use electricity? Bring the fainting couch!
I really don’t get this antipathy toward Al Gore from the right. Yes, I know his anti-global warming crusade has challenged the power structure and Big Oil. But the right has been gunning for Gore since before the 2000 election. They’ve been acting like he’s some kind of major threat to their plan for world domination since forever.
Maybe he is. All I know is, I'm sick of these kind of smears. If you have something real to slam Gore on, then do it. But don't doctor and edit the soundbite. That just proves you've got nothing. It's evidence that your motivation is the smear. We're all just tired of it.
