Giving Equal Time to the Truth
        by Tom Wolfsehr with help from Cathy and online friends

A Monday evening in August of 2000: Cathy's favorite independent
bookstore has been closed for more than an hour, yet she visits the
store online from home and orders a book,  before checking her e-mail,
transferring funds to her checking account, and paying some bills.
All this Cathy does with an affordable computer, a product of a long
series of advancements in technology, such as the government funded
ENIAC (Electrical Numerical Integrator And Calculator). ENIAC
technology isn't something that Cathy could use, let alone afford. The
ENIAC is three times the size of Cathy's home and uses more power in
a few minutes than Cathy's electrical meter will register in years. Many
incremental steps taken in research and development were required to
achieve the technology and infrastructure that saves Cathy time
and puts so much at her fingertips.

Government funded research also sparked important private sector
investment and advances, but the usefulness of  advanced technologies was
not as widely recognized as it needed to be. To assure American leadership
in the field, Al Gore from the seventies onward spoke out and sponsored
hearings to develop understanding of how high speed telecommunications
could improve economic growth, education, and the effectiveness of
government. He proposed legislation essential to the creation of the Internet
as it is today, which required a complex transition process to free it from the
governmental control of its infancy.

The prototype of the browser Cathy uses to surf the web was funded
by the High-Performance Computing and Communications Initiative, an
effort begun in 1987 and led to passage in 1991 by Al Gore. Gore's
IIT Act of 1992 further moved advanced technology from the laboratory
to commercial use. MIT President Charles Vest described Al Gore as the
"public leader of the National Information Infrastructure," recalling his
systematic achievement in the House and Senate in development of the
supercomputers and fiber optic networks necessary to realization of the
World Wide Web.

Election Day, November 2000: Although Al Gore had been recognized
for a decade in the National Journal as the Internet's "most determined
advocate" in Congress, and for longer than that by many computer scientists,
neither Cathy nor anyone she knows is aware of this when they vote in the
2000 election. Everyone has heard many times that Al Gore claimed to have
"invented the Internet" and that he will say anything to get elected. No one
realizes that Al Gore had not claimed to have "invented the Internet". Although
two months before the election Newt Gingrich described Al Gore's role in
developing the Internet the same way that Al Gore had, the media did not
report it.

September 1, 2001: Cathy is online when she happens upon what Newt
Gingrich and Al Gore had said side by side:
Gore (March 1999): "During my service in the U.S. Congress, I took the initiative
in creating the Internet."
Gingrich (September 2000): "Gore is the person who, in the Congress, most
systematically worked to make sure that we got to an Internet."

Today: Cathy feels betrayed by the media. "Why didn't they give equal time to
the truth?" she asks.

Tomorrow:

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