Mainstream Media Assists False Rumor Mills
by Ken Wikle
Posted on 2008-01-24 16:20:30
There’s been an enormously troubling aspect to the two preceding presidential campaigns. It’s not just that one side or the other has spread false stories about the opposition candidate – that sort of churlishness has been the norm since the early days of our republic. It’s that a significant segment of corporate-owned mainstream media was complicit in spreading the falsehoods.
Examples abound. A near perfect one bubbled up during the 2000 campaign in the form of “I invented the internet.” Al Gore said that, and he lied, right? Wrong. He never said it, but it nevertheless became an urban myth of epic proportions.
The birth of the internet occurred during the late sixties when scientists connected two computers: one at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica and the other at UCLA. By today’s standards it was the equivalent of two tin cans and a string, but soon four universities were connected, and the system quickly multiplied. The net was the product of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, part of the Department of Defense, and was called the ARPAnet. A technology called TCP/IP became crucial to the net, but it was proprietary to ARPA (later renamed DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). Assisted by members of Congress including Congressman and later Senator Al Gore in the late seventies and early eighties, legal control of TCP/IP technology was transferred to the National Science Foundation, which instituted the NSFnet. It ultimately became the underpinning for the civilian-use internet.
Al Gore was a true techno-nerd and one of the few in Congress who understood the significance of the net. He sponsored legislation that underwrote the development of the first browsers, crucial to the start of the World Wide Web. He brokered an agreement between NSF and others that put the net into the private sector and made it financially viable. James E. Traub, a computer science professor at Columbia University has said that Gore “was perhaps the first political leader to grasp the importance of networking the country.” Vincent Cerf, often called the Father of the Internet, has stated that the internet “would not be where it is in the United States without the strong support given to it and related research areas by Al Gore.”
What did Gore actually say? During an interview on CNN in 1999 Gore stated that while a Congressman and Senator he “took the initiative in creating the internet.” Not perhaps the best choice of words, but it is crystal clear from the transcript that he was referring to work he had done as a legislator, work that set the internet free from the Department of Defense, provided incentives for internet research and created ways for free enterprise to use the net profitably. Gore was proud of that, and rightfully so.
But you can look in vain for an archived news story prominently published or broadcast by a mainstream major news outlet prior to the election that reveals that Gore never claimed “I invented the internet.” There were other stories put forth by Gore’s political enemies that were equally false but nevertheless given credence by segments of the mainstream media. As a result, a significant portion of the electorate went to the polls in November 2000 believing that Al Gore engaged in the reprehensible practice of exaggerating or even inventing his accomplishments and was, at his core, a liar. It might well have cost him the election.
Four years later the Democratic candidate was John Kerry, a genuine war hero. Before you could say “Fox News” a group called the Swift Boat Liars for Bush (or some such) crawled out of the woodwork. They claimed that the awarding of Kerry’s 3 Purple Hearts, a Silver Star and a Bronze Star were based on falsehoods, and that they were there in Vietnam and knew the “truth.” It turns out they weren’t there, just nearby, whereas people who were there corroborated the official reports that recommended giving the decorations to Kerry. Many news organizations immediately stopped running the hatchet-job falsehoods, but too many outlets gave at least some credence to the liars, doing on-the-one-hand-but-on-the-other-hand stories. This may not have cost Kerry the election, but it sure didn’t help.
Today the right wing evildoers are at it already. An exceptionally scurrilous email about Barack Obama is being widely circulated. It asserts that Obama became a Muslim under his stepfather’s tutelage, was sent by his stepfather to be schooled at “Wahabi” school for indoctrination in Islamist radicalism, and that he took his oath for the Senate with his hand on the Koran. Moreover Obama “…will NOT recite the Pledge of Allegiance nor will he show any reverence for our flag. While others place their hands over their hearts, Obama turns his back to the flag and slouches.” All of it is easily provable nonsense if one checks any of the websites that research the validity of nutty emails. His attendance at public schools is well documented and there is no question that he’s a Christian. But that doesn’t stop scurrilous creeps like Rush Limbaugh from referring to the email and hinting that it’s true. Worse yet, it’s too often referred to by the denizens of Fox News, which begs this question: Do those people have an ounce of journalistic integrity?
But all this is tame compared to what we will see if Hillary Clinton becomes the Democratic nominee. Examples already abound. We will see a torrent of false stories designed to curl the hair of the average voter, and Limbaugh and the Fox News people will trumpet all of it. Unfortunately too many in the mainstream media outlets will follow suit.
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