Paul Krugman on what no self-respecting journalist would repeat on Gore
There was an unexpectedly high amount of traffic to my website today, going to the page on Al Gore "invented the Internet". A small but notable blip. It seems the source was the remark in a NYTimes Paul Krugman column:
If a reporter must use anecdotes, they'd better be true. After the Dean endorsement, innumerable reporters cracked jokes about Al Gore's inventing the Internet. Guys, he never said that: it's a malicious distortion of a true statement, and no self-respecting journalist would repeat it.
He said it, I didn't :-). So I took a look what's repeated in the official Declan McCullagh biography:
"[Declan] McCullagh was the first journalist to question Vice President Gore's claim to have created the Internet ...
I suppose that's a slight improvement from the much earlier version, which read
... the first to question Vice President Gore's claim to have invented the Internet ...
I don't think the problem is quite about "self-respecting". A more accurate phrase might be "truth-respecting" (so many examples ...)
By Seth Finkelstein | posted in journo | on December 26, 2003 05:20 PM (Infothought permalink) | Followups
