Desperately Seeking the News
Once upon a time, back when Bill Clinton was president and Al Gore was veep, the joke around The Tennessean newsroom was that, were Clinton to be whacked by an assassin, the headline the next day in the newspaper would be, “It’s Gore!”
Nashville’s morning fish wrapper has had a decades-long love affair with the Carthage-born son of former U.S. Sen. Albert Gore Sr. When the younger Gore was just a pup, back before he ever ran for Congress, he was a crack reporter for the daily. Since then, the paper has been known for covering Al Gore with all the objectivity of a father coaching his son’s baseball team.
It’s probably a dated rap, though, given that neither the paper’s editor nor its publisher has any connection to the pol-turned-environmental activist. Nevertheless, the history was a convenient truth for conspiracy theorists in the aftermath of last week’s Tennessee Center for Policy Research get on Gore—exposing the Oscar winner of An Inconvenient Truth as a hypocrite for using more than 10 times more electricity at his Belle Meade mansion in a year than do most American consumers. A Nashville Electric Service spokeswoman told media outlets that The Tennessean is the only outfit that had ever formally requested information on Gore’s energy use, and she said the paper had done so in January.
Those curious niblets of information led folks to scratch their heads and speculate. “Who Really Launched the Gore Hit Piece?” a screed last week on the Daily Kos blog read. The NES revelation raised some legitimate questions about how this story reared its head. If the policy center never asked for the information, how did it get it? Did The Tennessean relinquish the data to the conservative think tank so that it wouldn’t have to be the messenger? Did the paper simply share the information so the center could comment, only to see the outfit take the information and issue its own late-in-the-day release? Was it all a big coincidence? And, most importantly, why did the newspaper sit on the story?
Trent Seibert, a former Tennessean (and WKRN-Channel 2) reporter who is now director of government accountability for the center, says the group decided to ask NES for the public information the morning after the Oscars and called the utility’s customer service department instead of the communications office, which is why the spokeswoman was unaware that the center had sought the data. He made copies of the notes from those calls and turned them over to the Scene. He says the center had no knowledge that the newspaper had the information.
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Tennessean reporter Anne Paine, meanwhile, says the implication on Daily Kos is absurd. “It’s totally goofy. Why would I give information to a group, no matter what their politics are, to release instead of writing it ourselves? People see conspiracies, but the fact is we’re just like any other organization. We had planned on going with it sooner. We weren’t in a great rush because we figured no one else had it.”
Tennessean editor Mark Silverman says the paper did indeed make the public information request back in January, after Gore’s global warming film was nominated for an Academy Award on Jan. 23. He says the explanation for why the paper didn’t use the information until after the Oscars has nothing to do with a pro-Gore agenda.
“It’s very simple. We had other stuff. We got occupied by other stories,” he says. “We requested the information right after he was nominated for the Oscars…. It got put on the back burner simply because people were working on other stories. At that point, from a news peg standpoint, it seemed like the next logical news peg was he won or did not win an Oscar.”
Paine says that in addition to working on pieces about DuPont and Wolf Creek Dam, she was having trouble getting comment about Gore’s energy use. “I was trying to set up an interview, but it turned out that half the people in the newsroom were trying to set up interviews with Gore for different reasons.”
At the end of day following the Oscars, Paine shut off her computer, put on her coat and was heading out the door to see her sick mom when the center’s press release came across her editor’s email box. “I did manage to get the Gore people, and I had the full records,” Paine says, so she filed the story for the next day.
In the end, the paper missed out on getting the exclusive scoop, one that had the center’s director on innumerable cable television shows for a week and saw Seibert doing radio interviews with media outlets as far afield as South America.
Since then, both the policy center and the newspaper have been on the receiving end of venomous emails and phone calls. One staffer at the policy center got an unlisted number because of threatening calls. Paine says she’s been called a “Nazi bitch,” among all manner of other choice descriptors.
“A number of us have received emails on both sides of this,” Silverman says. “We’ve been accused by both sides that we’re the tool of the other, which suggests to me that we’re the tool of neither. In terms of the total amount of comment we got, it was really nothing that we wouldn’t expect about anything you write about Al Gore. He is, for better or worse, a polarizing figure.”