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Politics : Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kerry -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TigerPaw who wrote (9945)	3/24/2004 3:32:59 PM
From: Karen Lawrence	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 81568

If Wolf Blitzer had thought that Gore was saying, as neocons continue to lie, that he invented the Internet, he would have nailed him on it during that interview. That Al Gore once claimed to have "invented the Internet" is now part of electoral folklore -- one item in a litany of Gore "exaggerations" or "lies" that his opponents trot out to discredit him. At Tuesday's debate the line became the basis for a flatfooted one-liner George W. Bush lobbed to deflect Gore's onslaught of statistics: "This is a man who has great numbers -- I'm beginning to think not only did he invent the Internet, he invented the calculator." The sheer cheek of Gore's purported claim invites mockery. Everybody knows the Internet is an extraordinarily complex piece of engineering that only incredibly smart scientists could have "invented." Politicians need not apply. But things that "everybody knows" are always worth examining for defects. And the "Gore claims he invented the Net" trope is so full of holes that it makes you wish there were product recalls for bad information. Gore never claimed to have "invented" the Internet. What he said was: During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet. As my colleague Jake Tapper carefully reported here last year, at worst that statement is a minor exaggeration of Gore's legislative record -- and miles away from the "I built it from scratch!" lie into which it has been twisted. dir.salon.com

To: TigerPaw who wrote (9945)	3/24/2004 3:43:12 PM
From: Karen Lawrence	Respond to of 81568

[That Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet has got to be the most successful flat-out lie since, well, the last one. I swear that I see it repeated in the media at least once a day. For example: Who's the real Al Gore? Attempts to answer that question expose a peculiar tone deafness and low-stakes dishonesty. Gore says he invented the Internet instead of saying, truthfully, that he pushed technological research. This is from a book review in the 3/26/00 Washington Post. What's so striking is the projection: here are all of these people telling lies about Al Gore, while pretending that Al Gore is the liar. Of course it's hard to find the dividing line between conscious lying -- people who know that something is false but say it anyway -- and the mere spreading of rumors -- also known as the media echo chamber. How does it work? Well, in this case the starting-point is clear enough. To find it, fire up Google <http://www.google.com/> and type in "Gore invented Internet". Mostly you will find the downstream version of the rumor: comments that simply presuppose that Gore had made such a claim. But you will also find an ideological hit-piece on Wired News: wired.com This article repays close reading. It argues, for example, that Gore cannot reasonably take credit for the Internet because ARPANET was invented years before he entered Congress. That a Wired reporter could confuse ARPANET with the Internet is disappointing to say the least. Yet this same argument appears in a press release from Dick Armey's office the same day: politechbot.com That was echo number one. Other common tricks are on display. The Wired article suggests that Gore is ignorant of Internet technology on the petty grounds that he once pronounced "router" as "rooter", and the vast evidence that he does understand the technology and its significance is not reported. The question of Gore's credit for the Internet is not submitted to someone who was actually there, like Dave Farber or Joe Traub, but to a guy from a Republican think tank. That guy's quote is so twisted that I don't have room here to describe its full complexity. Read it for yourself. The original Wired article quotes Gore's famous words and glosses them as claiming to be "father of the Internet" and "took credit for the Internet". But the word "invented" does not appear in the text. (Nor does it appear in the keywords in the HTML source code. So why does it show up in a search for "Gore invented Internet"?) Although my search facilities are not the best, I cannot find any use of the word "invented" in the media until it appears in another Wired News article 12 days later: wired.com This article reads in part as follows: Al Gore's timing was as unfortunate as his boast. Just as Republicans were beginning to eye the 2000 presidential race in earnest, the vice president offered up a whopper of a tall tale in which he claimed to have invented the Internet. This is an important part of the echo-chamber effect. Start with a fact, then circulate a paraphrase of that fact that makes it sound slightly damning without actually falsifying it. Then once that paraphrase becomes widely circulated, circulate a paraphrase of the paraphrase that sounds even more damning. Repeat. In this case, many paraphrases were circulated. Wired, for example, summarized the original article as follows: Vice President Gore tells a reporter the Internet was his idea. Nice try, Al. The first few paraphrases, then, were tendentious and polemical, exaggerated and misleading, but one hesitates to call them "lies". Gore made clear that the actions he took on behalf of the Internet were in the context of his Congressional service; he is clearly taking credit for legislative initiatives, and in fact he frequently used the word "Initiative" when naming his proposals. It's only when we get to the word "invented" that we cross into the territory of clear- cut falsehood. The word "invented" suggests technical work, and the suggestion is that Al Gore claims to have done the technical work behind the Internet. That's just not true. And once that falsehood entered the media echo chamber, there was no stopping it. "Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet" is a fun thing to say, and it can spread far and wide without the evidence or context following it. More: commons.somewhere.com