"Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet," and an endless slew of other slanders for the better part of two years prior to November of 2000.
The corporate media didn't want a strong advocate for freedom of speech in the White House and Al Gore was the strongest major political leader supporting opening the Internet for the people.
It's the same ancient human motivations that had mythological Zeus chain Prometheus to a rock and have a buzzard eat his liver for all eternity because he stole fire and gave it to humans, prior to that only the Gods had fire.
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Introduction
It has become an automatic laugh. Jay Leno, David Letterman, or any other comedic talent can crack a joke about Al Gore "inventing the Internet," and the audience is likely to respond with howls of laughter. Even Gore himself participates in the merriment: in a recent episode of Leno's Tonight Show, Vice President Al Gore was seen holding the cue cards. The joke? "Al Gore invented cue cards" - a clear reference to Gore's supposed claim about the invention of the Internet. In his September 26, 2000 town hall meeting held as part of MTV's "Choose or Lose" series before a group of students at the Media Union at the University of Michigan, Gore joked, "I invented the environment." The students erupted in laughter. Gore is at once the object and progenitor of the humor.
The commonly accepted wisdom is that Al Gore, prone to exaggerating his record, claimed at one point on national television that he "invented the Internet." Not only is this fodder for comedians' monologues, this widely accepted folklore may have materially affected the 2000 Presidential campaign:
Gore is seen by many pundits, and presumably by millions in the public at large, as a politician who makes up the facts to fit the desires of the audience. Given the putative "fact" that he claimed to have "invented the Internet," this tendency towards exaggeration apparently even extends to Gore's own resume. No one would hire a new employee who was known to have padded a resume; who would vote for a candidate for the presidency who had done the same?
Gore has been effectively estopped from engaging in serious discussion of Internet issues from the perspective of a politician who knew and cared about the evolution of the national information infrastructure. The 2000 Presidential campaign has been deprived of debate and discourse that could have been informative and beneficial to the Internet community and the citizenry at large.
One might see these consequences as the natural - and deserved - outcome of Gore's own exaggeration. There is only one problem with this evaluation. It simply isn't true. Just as Rick never said "Play it again, Sam," in Casablanca, Al Gore never claimed to have "invented the Internet." That simple fact apparently isn't important to the journalists and comedians who repeat the claim.
This article explores how the perception arose that Gore in essence padded his resume by claiming to have invented the Internet. We will then explore Gore's actual record, in particular as a U.S. Senator in the late 1980s, as an advocate for high-speed national networking. Finally we will examine this case as an example of the trivialization of discourse and debate in American politics.
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https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/799/708
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