When WSJ Flunks Internet History, Blogs Step In To Educate
from the but-we-need-to-support-newspapers dept
We hear over and over again from traditional reporters how we need to "protect" newspapers and how, as newspapers fail, no one can step in and replace them -- especially not "new media" like blogs. In fact, we're told how newspapers are "trustworthy," but blogs are "amateurish" and prone to hyperbole and errors. It's a common story told over and over again -- especially by those supporting the idea of paywalls and the like. In fact, we wrote about yet another such example just recently. And yet... it seems that we just as frequently hear about newspapers making big mistakes, and blogs stepping in to correct them.Today's example involves the supposedly venerable Wall Street Journal, who posted a column by former publisher L. Gordon Crovitz, trying to claim that the internet was really invented by private companies, without much government support. Except, of course, that's false. Ridiculously false. Thankfully, we had blogs to step in and debunk many of the factual errors made by Crovitz. Quickly into the breach stepped Steve Wildstrom at Tecpinions, who pointed out that Crovitz's version of history was way off and then Tim Lee at Ars Technica, who went even deeper in showing how Crovitz mangled the history.
Among the many, many errors in Crovitz's piece were the claims that Tim Berners-Lee (no relation to Tim Lee above) "invented hyperlinks." He did no such thing. He invented the web, which came long after hypertext and hyperlinks were well known and well-established. He also tries to downplay Arpanet, and worst of all pretends that because Vint Cerf (with Bob Kahn) invented TCP/IP, that it shows it was done without the government's help. He, of course, leaves out that both were employed... by the government. It also plays up the importance of ethernet, invented at Xerox PARC. This was a big deal (and I even have a photo of the first ethernet connection that I recently took on a tour of PARC), but that was for local networks and not "the internet."
To be fair, this is the opinion pages, not the reporting pages, but the WSJ is supposed to have a pretty high bar for getting facts right, isn't it? And I would assume that applies to the opinion pages as well. Of course, what's interesting is that Crovitz has a history of this kind of thing. A couple years ago, we wrote about another piece by him which misattributed a quote of mine to someone else's and then took three days or so to post a correction. This Crovitz piece has added one correction at the time of my writing this, but only for (another) misattributed quote (Crovitz apparently didn't realize that he was quoting a blog post by Tyler Cowen quoting someone else and attributed it to Cowen). Everything else is still in there.
Of course, even more ironic in all of this is that Crovitz helped found Journalism Online -- one of the leading companies pushing newspapers to set up paywalls, arguing that newspapers need people to pay, or all good reporting will go away. Everyone makes mistakes. It's not limited to either newspapers or blogs. I don't mean to pick on Crovitz or the WSJ in particular here (even though the mistakes in his piece were both plentiful and easily cross checked). It's just that the idea that newspapers have some sort of "lock" on factual, objective reporting -- whereas newfangled "blogs" are chock full of misinformation -- is an inaccurate position. Yes, there's plenty of misinformation spread on various sites, but the same thing shows up in "traditional" media too. The point is that the wider ecosystem seems to be pretty damn good at highlighting those mistakes (even if the WSJ is then very slow to correct them).
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: blogs, history, internet, journalism, l gordon crovitz, reporting
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Opinion journal is a wholly separate operation
It's just not true. The WSJ opinion pages are in line with the Washington Times and the very worst of the reactionary wing of the Republican Party. It's as bad as the WSJ news pages are good.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Opinion journal is a wholly separate operation
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
http://weeklyworldnews.com/
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Who ever said that has never read the Daily Mail (a UK paper).
There should never be any protection for any business or industry. Businesses should be allowed to fail when they can no longer sustain themselves and new businesses should be able to step up and take their place.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
They're all wrong!
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: They're all wrong!
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: They're all wrong!
Tell me...is it everything I deamed it would be?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: They're all wrong!
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: They're all wrong!
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: They're all wrong!
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
What baffles me is that even if Crovitz believes in the whole "newspapers are professional, blogs are amateurs," wouldn't it hurt to open up the search engine of his choice and type in "history of the Internet?" I checked Google, Bing and Yahoo and found plenty of sites that provides some information on the history of the Internet. So let me guess here: is it...
1) he was on a deadline to not do the research,
2) a little (or too) lazy to put some effort into the research,
3) didn't want to put any effort in his search,
4) actually did some research but got a wrong source, or
5) any combination of the above.
My money's on Option 5.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
The real reason.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: The real reason.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
I think he started with the premise of, "my conservative dogma dictates that Obama must be wrong about everything and my corporate overlords insist I push this narrative, therefore I will find a way to refute his statements!"
And he just went from there, doing shoddy research to find any work on something networking related (even if only peripherally related to the actual internet) that wasn't expressly done by someone in the government.
And if you read through the comments on the article, you'll find his intended audience piping up with their two minutes hate against the object of their hatred, Emmanuel Goldst...I mean, Barack Obama. He didn't write the article for anyone who actually knew anything about the origins of the internet, much less people who knew the difference between the internet and the world wide web. Some of them are probably the same people who thought AOL was the internet.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Easy to Understand
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
The other point
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: The other point
It also doesn't help that the quality of journalism has degraded at exactly the same time.
Murrow would be embarrassed.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
"The" Arpanet
FWIW, since most of us used case-insenstive systems, and frequently uppercase defaults, capitalization isn't really a big deal: ARPANET, arpanet, ARPAnet...unlike the Internet, which is the mongo big internet of them all.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
More wsj bs - IGNORE IT
File under pure bs.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Another reason old media is failing
Reporters Muzzled by Campaigns
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfmJ-ju6Y3E&feature=g-u-u
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
=P
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
What do you expect?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
What gets me
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
WSJ
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Opinion piece
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]