WSJ Still Hasn't Corrected Its Bogus Internet Revisionist Story, As Vint Cerf & Xerox Both Claim The Story Is Wrong

from the how-do-you-correct-a-story-that's-almost-entirely-wrong? dept

We recently discussed a Wall Street Journal opinion piece by its former publishers, L. Gordon Crovitz, in which he made some fantastically false claims about the origins of the internet. What was noteworthy was that while the WSJ got the story so totally wrong, lots of others, including bloggers, leapt into the fray to explain why Crovitz was wrong. Almost everyone he sourced or credited to support his argument that the internet was invented entirely privately at Xerox PARC and when Vint Cerf helped create TCP/IP, has spoken out to say he's wrong. And that list includes both Vint Cerf, himself, and Xerox. Other sources, including Robert Taylor (who was there when the internet was invented) and Michael Hiltzik, have rejected Crovitz's spinning of their own stories.

Basically, anyone and everyone is telling the WSJ that it got this story totally and completely wrong. You might think the WSJ would start making some corrections. Instead, it's made one single correction: That was a pretty minor correction, involving Crovitz being confused about how to understand how blockquotes work in HTML. But what about all of the other factual errors, including whoppers like saying that Tim Berners-Lee invented hyperlinks? Of course, considering the very premise of the article and nearly all of its supporting factoids were in error, it raises questions about how you do such a correction, other than crossing out the whole thing and posting a note admitting to the error (none of which has yet been done). Given the widespread discussion online about these errors -- both in blogs and in traditional media, it seems like the company's silence about the whole thing is just making the problem worse. Why won't the WSJ step up and issue a real correction on all of the errors?

Filed Under: arpanet, corrections, errors, history, internet, l gordon crovitz, parc, vint cerf
Companies: xerox

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).

Filed Under: blogs, history, internet, journalism, l gordon crovitz, reporting