The Wall Street Journal kept up a group blog during the D conference. Here’s how it characterized my post below about Gore’s talk:
“I went into the hour-and-a-half session hoping that Gore would run in 2008, and by the end I was hoping he wouldn’t,” Mr. Rosenberg wrote, adding that after Mr. Gore’s talk, he sees more potential for him as a media player than a politico. |
Thanks for the link and all, but this is just wrong, distorting a positive posting into a negative review. I said that Gore’s critique of the media was so powerful and delivered with such passion that I thought it might be even more important for him to dedicate himself to “changing the very structure of the media landscape” than merely to run for president. In other words, I’m not talking about Gore as a “media player” but rather as a media game-changer. I think anyone who read my admittedly lengthy post could see that.
While we’re on the subject: It was amazing to hear how people — among the crowd at D and the Journal people covering it (like Alan Murray, here), and even the conference hosts, Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher — responded to Gore’s discussion of the history of media. What I found a familiar but valuable review of how we got into the media-political mess we’re in today was, apparently, unbearable to many others.
Let’s put this in perspective: Gore wanted to explain the motivation behind Current.tv, and to put today’s Internet-shaped changes in a historical context stretching back to the middle ages. He talked about how literally cloistered monastery libraries were, and how Gutenberg changed all that, making books and ideas accessible to a much wider slice of society, setting the groundwork for the great public arguments of late-18th century America that shaped the founding of this nation. He pointed out that the rise of broadcast TV in the mid-20th century limited the political conversation to a stifling, one-way communication, and described how the Internet — and, in a related way, Current.tv — offers some hope of getting more people involved once more in public dialogue and self-expression.
In other words, Gore spent maybe five minutes of a 90-minute conversation reviewing a little history. It wasn’t unique or earth-shattering, but neither was it inordinately detailed or arcane; it wasn’t that different from what you might hear from bloggers like Jeff Jarvis or Dan Gillmor. Maybe the manner was a little professorial, but so what?
And this, apparently, was taxing. This was intolerably dull. To Alan Murray, a writer whose normal beat involves the scintillating fluctuation of interest rates and stock averages, this was cause for “stacking Zs.” This was more, it seems, than the brains of the D crowd — an unabashedly elite concentration of the corporate and media class — should be asked to bear.
I don’t get it. Maybe we’ve grown so accustomed to brain-dead leaders, anti-intellectualism in high places and the assiduous scouring of historical knowledge from the corridors of power that when a public figure dares to display some actual perspective and tries to communicate it, we respond with a barrage of sarcasm and cynicism. Mocking politicians who talk about history may give some of us a little jolt of solidarity with the people we imagine as “regular folk” — and that commodity may be precious at a conference where an unusually high percentage of attendees arrived by private jet. But it doesn’t help us improve the quality of national leadership.
I, for one, would have felt a lot better, for instance, if a president who tried to lead us into a war in Iraq had been able to talk, extemporaneously, for five or ten minutes about the history of past interventions in Iraq, and how, exactly, ours was going to be different. History isn’t dead knowledge — it’s the best foundation we have for peering into the future. Making fun of Gore, or any other leader who tries to bring history to bear on our problems today, isn’t just unfair; it’s head-in-the-sand dumb.
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