What is exactly was the fake news from the election cycle? The DNC never denied the veracity of the Wikileaks emails, they only said that Russia hacked into the e-mails. Hillary claimed that no foreign country ever hacked her email server then claimed when the Podesta emails hit, that the accounts had been hacked by Russia. Did Russia manufacture over 70,000 emails to keep Hillary out of the White House? Even if Russia obtained the info through hacking and released it, it doesn't make it false. What information in the Wikileaks emails was proven to be incorrect?
Al Gore was trying to to distance himself from the Clintons partly because of the Monica Lewinsky scandal and partly because of his anger at how his position of VP had been usurped by Hillary's machinations. As the Clintons held all the money and the power in the party, his campaign staff was filled with Clintonites. The campaign manager was Donna Brazile, who ran such a terrible campaign that I'm still surprised that she wasn't tainted by it. Al Gore is about as exciting as a loaf of Wonderbread, and Donna exacerbated this by insisting that he adopt the Centrism of the Clintons in order to win which made him even blander politically. His campaign message changed with the day: he was a moderate, then a conservative, then a populist, then a moderate again and there was never any core message. Bob Shrum (a political advisor with 8 losing campaigns under his belt) attempted to turn Al Gore into a populist candidate and clashed with Donna's centrism and Al's inherit yuppiness. Al wanted to make environmentalism a key issue in his campaign but was talked out of it. In debates, he triangulated so strongly that he ended up agreeing with Bush on most issues which left people feeling like their wasn't much difference between the two candidates. This feeling was a the main reason why Ralph Nader became as successful as he did; he was the only person in the debate offering any kind of change or difference. Ralph often pointed out that the two candidates and the two parties were the same with no differences between them. Nadar's popularity should have lead to massive changes in the campaign's strategy because even a minor voter shift in his direction would have upended their 51-49 campaign strategy. At the beginning of the recount effort, Al Gore had a degree of good will from the public but after a certain point people started to see him as a sore loser. The Democrats as a whole did not really fight for Al Gore, especially after the Supreme Court decision. Al wanted to keep going, but the Democrats and the Clintons started turning up the talk about reconciling the country and Al was left stranded. People see him as a hero now, but from the 2000 election up until An Inconvient Truth he was a pariah. At first he was seen as a persnickety effete who couldn't handle losing and then (when the horror of the Bush years started rolling in) he was seen as a weakling who didn't fight hard enough.
John Kerry was a good politician with great ideas, no charisma, and a shytty campaign. His second campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill (a former assistant to Bill Clinton) and his political consultant Bob Schrum (again) told him not to respond to the Swiftboat attacks that killed his campaign. He was beset by endless advisors and consultants who gave him terrible advice and positions that he half-assed sold to the public. He was a war-hero against war who was against the Iraq war until he was for it. By the time he was able to rest control of his campaign and steer it his way, it was too late. His concession earned him the wrath of Democratic voters and in turn made him a pariah like Gore. There is a reason why Obama created his own team of political outsiders for the '08 election.