Once again Al Gore is right. He was right about the dangers of climate change, even though no one would listen until now, and he's right in his new book about the danger to our democracy of a citizenry that is underinformed and overtitillated.

"Wake up, America," Gore calls out in his stuffed-shirt professorial way in "The Assault on Reason." You are being manipulated by television news that is feeding you nonstop fear and infotainment. This empty-calorie diet is skewing our national priorities and atrophying the "mental muscles of democracy."

Reasoned argument emanating from evidence-based knowledge is disappearing from our national discourse, exacerbated by millions of Americans' discarding the habit of daily newspaper consumption, according to Gore. In its stead are the flickering lights of the boob tube that elevate image and aural stimulation over critical thinking and logic.

Gore quotes Dan Rather, who pithily said that television news has been "dumbed down and tarted up." We are bombarded with news 24/7. Yet never has so much been seen by so many to so little import. We know far more about Laci Peterson's disappearance, O.J. Simpson's glove size and Anna Nicole Smith's stomach contents than the financial crisis facing Medicare or the consequences of climate change and America's ongoing contribution to it.

Violent crime rates have plummeted over the last 15 years, but television news gives it outsized coverage, creating a climate of undifferentiated fear. Your probability of dying in a car accident is one in 83, compared with your one-in-1,300 chance of dying in a terror attack — and that's presuming a 9/11-style attack every year. Yet the ephemeral threats from jihadists dominate the airwaves.

The Manchurian Citizen emerges from his 4 1/2 hours of daily television, so overstimulated, fearful and flabby of brain that he is easy prey for politicians with simplistic messages.

This is Gore's other main point. A citizenry that abandons the dynamic exercise of reading and the reasoning process it engages, for the passive absorption of emotionally charged television images, is susceptible to choosing the worst kind of leaders. And it has.

President Bush and Vice President Cheney could never have held onto power and committed the wrongs they have against our constitutional system without a public too wrapped up in the news of Natalee Holloway in Aruba to care about domestic warrantless wiretapping.

Gore meticulously documents how Americans have been sleepwalking through their duties as citizens while this administration has been systematically destroying the pillars of our democracy: The Bush administration's torture of prisoners — an approach to war disdained by George Washington. The way it shredded the Geneva Conventions, and our international standing. And how it used our national treasury as a piggybank for friends and supporters.

Robyn Blumner can be reached at blumner@sptimes.com.