Despite what you may have heard, Al Gore never said he invented the Internet. He never claimed to have discovered the Love Canal. And if the fact that Tipper is still alive doesn’t convince you that the couple wasn’t the inspiration for love story, well, Evgenia Peretz’s most recent article in Vanity Fair is something you should read.

Titled “Going After Gore,” the article chronicles the willingness of the 1999–2000 press corps to pound on any misstep, real or imagined, by the Gore campaign while giving Bush’s own malapropisms and false statements a free pass. As Time magazine’s Margaret Carlson admitted to Don Imus at the time, “You can actually disprove some of what Bush is saying if you really get into the weeds and get out your calculator, or look at his record in Texas. But it’s really easy, and it’s fun to disprove Al Gore. As sport, and as our enterprise, Gore coming up with another whopper is greatly entertaining to us.”

Peretz doggedly chronicles exaggeration after exaggeration—not on the part of Gore, but on the part of some of the main players in the press, including Chris Matthews, Lou Dobbs, Maureen Dowd, Ceci Connolly of the Washington Post, and Katharine Seelye of the New York Times. According to the article, “A study conducted by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center and the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that 76 percent of stories about Gore in early 2000 focused on either the theme of his alleged lying or that he was marred by scandal, while the most common theme about Bush was that he was ‘a different kind of Republican.’”

This pettiness on the part of the press has enabled our country’s disastrous direction over the past seven years, leading us into senseless slaughter in Iraq, the utter destruction on an American city, and a government legacy of torture and eavesdropping. Even worse, it continues today, with articles focusing on John Edwards’ haircuts and Hillary Clinton’s cleavage. Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani lies blatantly about his time spent at Ground Zero, and there’s hardly an echo in the mainstream press (Bob Somersby’s The Daily Howler provides an excellent chronicle of the press’ failings. As he often states, “Only Democrats have character problems.”)

As the campaign for 2008 commences, it’s important not to let the press fall into a lazy reliance on caricature and stereotypes in presenting the positions of our Presidential candidates. Unfortunately, as Peretz’s article presents, few journalists seem to have learned the lessons of the 2000 campaign, much less the debacles of transcribing lies from anonymous government sources about aluminum tubes, mushroom clouds and yellow cake from Niger. (Recent coverage of Iran promotes more than a fleeting sense of déjà vu.)

The media’s rightful role is to provide truth to the American people, not a platform for their own biases or a smokescreen for government lies. The increased popularity of cynical commentary from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report shows that people are eager for something that doesn’t toe the official line. One can only wonder when we’ll be able to receive that same skeptical service from the real thing, instead of just as a joke.