Oops! Florida Accidentally Praised On Medical Malpractice

from the that-was-wrong dept

My political viewpoints are pretty simple: I don't trust anyone who is clearly associated with a political party when it comes to political issues. People who spout the party line always seem to do so while knowing that they're twisting the facts to make their point (and this happens on all sides of the political spectrum). I'd much rather people admit that there are multiple sides to a story and try to work out a reasonable solution. It's for this reason that I tend not to like reports coming out of most "political think tanks", since they're always biased to one side or the other. So, it must have been quite a shock last week when the conservative (Republican favorite) think tank "The Heritage Foundation" posted a report on their website sayng that Florida's malpractice laws were the tops in the nation. The Republicans have been working like crazy in that state to change those laws. They've been working so hard, in fact, that it only took a few hours for people higher up at the think tank to take the paper down and tell the author he had "misinterpreted" the data. Once again, the web is being used to rewrite history. A new report went up six hours later - and Florida has suddenly dropped from the best ranking (A+) to a failing grade of (D-). Who knows which ranking is right. I'm more interested in how what happened highlights the nature of how (1) information spreads rapidly on the internet and (2) history can be rewritten quickly online.
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  1. identicon
    Steve Snyder, 7 Feb 2003 @ 9:14am

    Regarding rewriting history

    Yes there's no question the internet allows people to rewrite history to their view--but it's not like some school history books haven't been doing that on certain issues for decades. And to flip it around, the very nature of the internet does help prevent this as well. Digital info on the web is just so easy to archive that it offers a level of protection that a lot of other mediums don't. While there's still a long way to go, things like the wayback machine at the Internet Archive and while less official or formal but perhaps more used and useful Google cache are making it much easier to see things the way they were.

    link to this | view in thread ]


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