Al Gore, Webby Award, Internet, Journalists
[I received this from a PR person, but consider it a mutual interest to post]
New York, NY (May 3, 2005) - The winners of The 9th Annual Webby Awards will be saluted alongside former Vice President Al Gore at the internet honors' ceremony in New York City on June 6th, the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences announced today.
Because:
The Webby Lifetime Achievement Award: Former Vice President Al Gore
Setting the record straight on one of recent history's most persistent political myths, The Webby Awards will present Former Vice President Al Gore with The Webby Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of the pivotal role he has played in the development of the internet over the past three decades. Vint Cerf, widely credited as one of the "fathers of the internet," will present Vice President Gore with the award.
As my page of Al Gore "invented the Internet" - resources documents, this myth has indeed been persistent. In fact, just very recently, the person who outright invented the story, Declan McCullagh ( "If it's true that Al Gore created the Internet, then I created the "Al Gore created the Internet" story."), was still propagating it in his columns ("... and Al Gore's apparently serious claim to have "created" the Internet.").
Note that extensive rebuttal in the comments, sadly does no good.
This leads to one of my questions to those infatuated with the idea of feedback and blogs fact-checking journalists: What if the "journalist" just doesn't care? What if he knows that what he writes, even if politically appealing fiction (in fact, especially if politically appealing fiction), will be sent to a huge number of people, and any corrections in comments or relatively trivial blogs will reach an insignificant audience? We have here a perfect case study of the phenomena.
By Seth Finkelstein | posted in journo | on May 04, 2005 11:59 PM (Infothought permalink)
