From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Just before Al Gore announced he would not be a candidate for president in 2004,

he vented to the New York observer that he and his fellow Democrats couldn't get a fair shake

from media increasingly in the pocket of Republicans.

But Al Gore has been flogged by media across the political spectrum, as Paul Waldman documents in the latest issue of the liberal American prospect.

Case in point. In 1999, candidate Gore was asked by a student why young people should bother getting involved in politics. He answered that when he was in Congress, a high school student from the town of Toon, Tennessee, wrote him about pollution and high rates of cancer in her town. As a result, Gore said, quote, I looked around the country for other sites like that.

I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal, had the first hearing on that

issue, and Toon, Tennessee, that was the one you didn't hear of, but that was the one that started

it all. That's what he said, but that's not what many of us read in the papers.

As Waldman notes, Catherine Seeley of the New York Times and C.C. Connolly of the Washington Post

reported that story.

And they misquoted him only with one word, but it was a critical word.

They changed his statement that said, that was the one that started it all,

referring to this young girl in Toon, Tennessee, to I was the one that started it all.

Uh-huh.

And they made it sound as though Al Gore had claimed that he had actually discovered the existence of toxic waste at Love Canal.

And it really upset the students there.

It did. They issued a press release complaining about it.

And I think one of the most critical things that happened is the next day after Gore

and his campaign complained about it, C.C. Conley wrote another article in the Washington Post.

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