The articles from Time magazine that cover the presidential campaigns and debates of Al Gore and George Bush present an array of opinions and ideological slants. In Margaret Carlson’s Is There A Double Standard?, the author does an excellent job of discussing how the Gore campaign’s toning down of the presidential candidate for debate two all but gave the victory to Bush because Gore was so appalled by a scathing satire of his first debate performance on Saturday Night Live that he sat numbly by while Bush delivered a slew of errors in the second debate “Perhaps if Gore had been alive, those mistakes would not have gone unanswered. But he was completely unnerved” (Carlson 62).
Carlson is not biased against either candidate but she does serve to underscore the fact that Bush botched many facts in the debate but Gore lost because of an unnatural reserve induced by panicked campaign advisers and media satire. Thus, she truly believes the media allowed Bush’s ignorance to go unchecked. Michael Weisskopf, in Tax Cuts Before Tots, does not allow Bush any such kind of immunity from scrutiny. He blasts Bush’s records in Texas and argues that the presidential candidate may promise to meet the people’s “basic needs” and return excess budget monies to “the hands who earned it”, but, in reality, he fought hard to eliminate many social goods proposals during his tenure in order to give huge tax cuts to the wealthy (Weisskopf 57). The article is not biased because all it does is present the facts of Bush’s tenure as governor of Texas, ones that destroy Bush’s “man of the people” rhetoric, like his emphasis on tax cuts instead of and at the expense of expanding eligibility and breaking down barriers for those in need Medicaid.
Nancy Gibbs’ presentation of the media coverage of the Gore/Bush debates in Where Is The Love?, knows no such objectivity. In this article her obvious support of Bush is demonstrated...