Wall Street Journal Fails to Correct Major Misstep
August 20, 2012
A big flub at Wall Street Journal was made when L. Gordon Crovitz made some extravagantly false claims about the origins of the Internet.
The incredibly wrong opinion piece by the former publisher was not the part of this story that is impressive. The fascinating part is that WSJ is not making any corrections, instead choosing to simply state, “A version of this article appeared July 23, 2012, on page A11 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Who Really Invented the Internet?” We learn more about the mishap in the TechDirt article, “WSJ Still Hasn’t Corrected Its Bogus internet Revisionist Story, As Vint Cerf & Xerox Both Claim the Story is Wrong.” The article states:
“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).”
We here at the goose pond love seeing real journalists in action. Considering how public the discussion about these errors has gotten, we are surprised that the WSJ is not doing more to remedy the situation. Which begs the question: why aren’t they?
Andrea Hayden, August 20, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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