Evgenia Peretz re-visits the savage media coverage of Al Gore's 2000 election campaign.
Here's a telling paragraph from the middle of Peretz's article:
One obstacle course the press set up was which candidate would lure voters to have a beer with them at the local bar. "Journalists made it seem like that was a legitimate way of choosing a president," says Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter. "They also wrongly presumed, based on nothing, that somehow Bush was more likable." Chris Matthews contends that "the likability issue was something decided by the viewers of the debates, not by the commentators," but adds, "The last six years have been a powerful bit of evidence that we have to judge candidates for president on their preparation for the office with the same relish that we assess their personalities."
The final remark from Chris Matthews put me in mind of Matthew Yglesias's "The Brain Thing" from over three years ago. I've linked to this piece before. In it Yglesias criticizes the media for falling into the trap — amply documented in Peretz's article — of over-emphasizing the character issue and wildly under-valuing or simply caricaturing the intelligence of a candidate.
By the way, Peretz's article is hardly the first time that someone has looked back at what the media did to Gore in 2000. Here's just one example — an article by Paul Waldman from early 2003. It's quite good. I recommend it.