Senator Lieberman for VP

This morning, Vice President Al Gore announced that Senator Joseph Lieberman has accepted an invitation to be the presidential hopeful's running mate in the coming electoral campaign. The Connecticut senator has earned national attention for his campaign against graphic representations of violence in computer and video games as well as in movies, television, and music. Gore's selection of Lieberman is said to be based on the senator's conservative support and image of moral rectitude - Lieberman was one of the first democrats to rebuke President Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Media violence has long been a central issue in Senator Lieberman's congressional activities. In the debates following the Columbine shootings last year, Lieberman spoke out against the marketing of violence to children and proposed a series of bills aimed at intensifying governmental scrutiny of representations of violence in the media. He has argued that the entertainment industry - referring to the producers of television, movies, music, and games - knowingly markets violent media content to minors, and he has drawn a comparison to the tobacco industry's Joe Camel advertisements. Lieberman is also a primary sponsor of the Video and Computer Game Report, an independent rating system for popular games issued by the National Institute on Media and the Family each December.