Why Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize...

The Peace Prize has become so politicized lately....it seems every year now, they make a mockery of people who really work for peace. Why hasn't Hirsi Ali won the Peace Prize???

Nobel Prize contenders aren’t supposed to campaign for the award. Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore didn’t need to because he had the media doing it for him for at least a year-and-a-half.

The award he shared with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) put Gore in the ranks of people like President Theodore Roosevelt, Mother Teresa, Lech Walesa and Martin Luther King. But none of them had the widespread media campaign Gore enjoyed – portraying him in almost messianic terms as an “evangelist,” a “preacher,” or a “prophet.”

CBS correspondent Mark Phillips had called the award “the most coveted and prestigious in the world” during the October 9 “Evening News” and warned Gore of making any public statement about it. “The Nobel Prize workings may be a mystery, but the rules are clear,” Phillips said. “No campaigning. Al Gore is rumored to be a hot tip for this year’s peace prize for his environmental work. The worst thing he could do is say he wants it.”

That didn’t matter. The media put Gore front and center on a seemingly endless stream of shows and networks – “Larry King,” the morning news shows, the nightly news programs and even “Saturday Night Live” and the Sci-Fi Channel. In just three months of summer of 2006, Gore and his movie had spent more than five hours and 38 minutes on national television. In 2007, eight networks under the umbrella of NBC set aside an incredible 93 hours to his “Live Earth” concert, including three hours in primetime on NBC.

The media’s nearly two-year celebration of Gore’s movie included many working journalists. In one of the most memorable appearances, then “Today” host Katie Couric gushed over the former vice president more like a fan than a newswoman. “I think in this movie at different turns you’re funny, vulnerable, disarming, self-effacing and someone said after watching it quote, ‘if only he was like this before, maybe things would have turned out differently in 2000,” she said to Gore on the May 24, 2006 “Today.”