Al Gore, Ace Reporter?

No profile of Al Gore is complete without the anecdote about his father telling the Nashville Tennessean, "If I have a baby boy, I don't want the news buried in the inside of the paper. I want it on page one where it belongs." And of course, when Albert Jr. was born, the front page photo was accompanied by the headline: "Well Mr. Gore, Here HE Is--On Page 1."

And so who better to join the ranks of those who study and teach the craft of journalism than a man who, as numerous pundits have pointed out, has lived on the front page from the day of his birth? Having Al Gore teach at Columbia as a visiting professor at the Graduate School of Journalism should be a fascinating opportunity to examine the relationship between the press and the government. The lines between the watchdog press and the powers that be get fuzzier every day, blurring, for example, when George Stephanopoulos went from being a White House adviser to an ABC commentator (with a stop at Columbia in between, of course--Gore is following a familiar pattern).

A good starting point in thinking about this tenuous and confused relationship is an incident Gore was involved in back in 1974. In the four years between Al Gore's return from Vietnam and his first run for Congress, he was a reporter for the Tennessean. He spent part of the time covering a city government rife with scandal.

His investigations led him to believe members of the Metro Council were routinely taking bribes to pass through zoning measures. Two council members in particular, Morris Haddox and Jack Clariday, were targeted by Gore's investigations.

The investigation of Haddox left lingering questions of propriety. Gore and the newspaper's publisher worked with the city district attorney to arrange and record a meeting between Haddox and a real estate developer who was one of Gore's main sources. The developer wore a wiretap, and Tennessean photographers were staking out the building. The exchange, bribe and all, ended up on the front page of the Tennessean.

The situation reminds us of how tricky it is to negotiate the terrain that separates journalists from the structures of authority and power that they cover. Imagine if a Spectator reporter figured out that a student council member was taking bribes from a campus group. Would it be ethical for the Spec to work with the Dean of Student Affairs to entrap the council member?

If you accept that the function of the press in any society, be it a nation, a city, or a campus, is to be a check on the prevailing power structure, then there must be a certain distance between the press and the authorities who enforce the rules. What kind of a position would the newspaper be in to report on the district attorney's office after having just worked so closely in conjunction with it?

Of course, Gore was a young reporter, and the ultimate responsibility for the incident belonged to his superiors at the paper. The publisher at the time, John Seigenthaler, told the Columbia Journalism Review in 1993 that he does not regret what happened, but he recognizes the ethical questions.

"I am as idealistic as I can be, but the reason it is so tough for us to develop a meaningful standard of ethics in journalism is that you are faced, from time to time, with critical decisions that cannot be made in the abstract," he told the magazine.

Gore has rarely commented publicly on the case. But during the 1988 campaign, he boasted to the Des Moines Register that the investigation for the Tennessean "got a bunch of people indicted and sent to jail."

Not only did that dodge the moral ambiguity, but it was one of the first less-than-accurate embellishments that would end up as a common caricature of Gore a dozen years later. There were only two men who were indicted on charges stemming from the investigation, and neither went to jail. Clariday's sentence was suspended, and Haddox was acquitted after a second trial.

In recent years, Gore said that the experience helped convince him to pursue politics, to have more influence over the system that led to Haddox's acquittal. As for Morris Haddox himself, he and Gore have since reconciled, and Haddox is back on the Nashville Metro Council.

The issues involved here are very much alive. Just this week, the Phoenix New Times sparked a controversy by interviewing a man who claims to be the arsonist who has been torching posh new half-built homes to protest urban sprawl. Other news outlets who had received the alleged arsonist's letters had turned them over to the FBI.

It is time for a serious dialogue about the interplay of the press and power structures at every level of society. Clearly Al Gore is going to be at Columbia for more important and immediate reasons than his career at the Tennessean. But if he is going to carry the moral authority of a professor of journalism, charged with upholding and instilling the best values of reporting as an art and a science, it seems proper for him to discuss this perfect case study from his own journalistic past.