In his June 18 column, Boulder Daily Camera columnist and former Republican congressional candidate Bob Greenlee repeated the inaccurate conservative cliché that former Vice President Al Gore “once claimed he had 'invented the internet.'” Numerous sources verify that Gore never stated that he “invented” the Internet.

Greenlee's false claim was part of an attack he leveled against An Inconvenient Truth, Gore's recently released documentary about global warming. Citing no direct evidence to support his attacks on the film, Greenlee asserted: “The guy who once claimed he had 'invented the internet' has invented whole new theories and produced a number of rather unappealing end-of-the-world scenarios in his new movie. He assembled this fiction with bits and pieces of 'facts,' surrounding them with questionable climate models, and then predicts unsupportable outcomes.”

Similarly, during a July 7 interview on KOA's The Mike Rosen Show, film critic Reggie McDaniel stated: “Well, see, here's the whole thing with An Inconvenient Truth: It's got Al Gore in it. And the same man who said he invented the Internet, so how much do you trust --.”

Greenlee's and McDaniel's false claim was based on a distortion of a March 9, 1999, CNN interview with CNN host Wolf Blitzer in which Gore noted that as a member of Congress, he “took the initiative in creating the Internet”:

BLITZER: I want to get to some of the substance of domestic and international issues in a minute, but let's just wrap up a little bit of the politics right now.

Why should Democrats, looking at the Democratic nomination process, support you instead of Bill Bradley, a friend of yours, a former colleague in the Senate? What do you have to bring to this that he doesn't necessarily bring to this process?

GORE: Well, I will be offering -- I'll be offering my vision when my campaign begins. And it will be comprehensive and sweeping. And I hope that it will be compelling enough to draw people toward it. I feel that it will be.

But it will emerge from my dialogue with the American people. I've traveled to every part of this country during the last six years. During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.

The distortion of Gore's remarks apparently originated in a March 11, 1999, Wired News article by Declan McCullagh, which stated, “It's a time-honored tradition for presidential hopefuls to claim credit for other people's successes. But Al Gore as the father of the Internet? ... That's what the campaigner in chief told CNN's Wolf Blitzer during an interview Tuesday evening.”

In a March 23, 1999, follow-up article, McCullagh first used the word “invented” in relation to Gore's remarks: “Al Gore's timing was as unfortunate as his boast. Just as Republicans were beginning to eye the 2000 presidential race in earnest, the vice president offered up a whopper of a tall tale in which he claimed to have invented the Internet.”

McCullagh later clarified in an October 20, 2000, Wired News article that “Gore never did claim to have 'invented' the Internet.” McCullagh explained, however, that following his article, congressional Republicans and journalists perpetuated the myth:

Which brings us to an important question: Are the countless jibes at Al's expense truly justified? Did he really play a key part in the development of the Net?

The short answer is that while even his supporters admit the vice president has an unfortunate tendency to exaggerate, the truth is that Gore never did claim to have “invented” the Internet.

During a March 1999 CNN interview, while trying to differentiate himself from rival Bill Bradley, Gore boasted: “During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.”

That statement was enough to convince me, with the encouragement of my then-editor James Glave, to write a brief article that questioned the vice president's claim. Republicans on Capitol Hill noticed the Wired News writeup and started faxing around tongue-in-cheek press releases -- inveterate neatnik Trent Lott claimed to have invented the paper clip -- and other journalists picked up the story too.

[...]

The terrible irony in this exchange is that while Gore certainly didn't create the Internet, he was one of the first politicians to realize that those bearded, bespectacled researchers were busy crafting something that could, just maybe, become pretty important.

In January 1994, Gore gave a landmark speech at UCLA about the “information superhighway.”

In an October 5, 2000, Salon.com article, Scott Rosenberg reported that Gore had been correct in stating that he “took the initiative in creating the Internet”:

But the defense of Gore currently underway feels to me less like a party-line effort than like the repayment of a debt of gratitude by Internet pioneers who feel that Gore is being unfairly smeared.

That's what you'll hear from Phillip Hallam-Baker, a former member of the CERN Web development team that created the basic structure of the World Wide Web. Hallam-Baker calls the campaign to tar Gore as a delusional Internet inventor “a calculated piece of political propaganda to deny Gore credit for what is probably his biggest achievement.”

“In the early days of the Web,” says Hallam-Baker, who was there, “he was a believer, not after the fact when our success was already established -- he gave us help when it counted. He got us the funding to set up at MIT after we got kicked out of CERN for being too successful. He also personally saw to it that the entire federal government set up Web sites. Before the White House site went online, he would show the prototype to each agency director who came into his office. At the end he would click on the link to their agency site. If it returned 'Not Found' the said director got a powerful message that he better have a Web site before he next saw the veep.”

Bob Somerby of The Daily Howler weblog wrote that, in a September 1, 2000, speech to the American Political Science Association, Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-GA) said that “Gore is the person who, in the Congress, most systematically worked to make sure that we got to an Internet”:

GINGRICH: In all fairness, it's something Gore had worked on a long time. Gore is not the Father of the Internet, but in all fairness, Gore is the person who, in the Congress, most systematically worked to make sure that we got to an Internet, and the truth is--and I worked with him starting in 1978 when I got [to Congress], we were both part of a “futures group”--the fact is, in the Clinton administration, the world we had talked about in the '80s began to actually happen.

The Los Angeles Times reported Gingrich's remarks in a September 22, 2000, article, noting that he “said earlier this month, 'Gore is the person who, in the Congress, most systematically worked to make sure that we got to an Internet.' ”

From Greenlee's June 18 Boulder Daily Camera column, headlined “I don't believe in climate fantasy” :

Unfortunately, far too many politically motivated folks have jumped on the Chicken Little bandwagon. Take former vice president and movie mogul Al Gore, for example.

The guy who once claimed he had “invented the internet” has invented whole new theories and produced a number of rather unappealing end-of-the-world scenarios in his new movie. He assembled this fiction with bits and pieces of “facts,” surrounding them with questionable climate models, and then predicts unsupportable outcomes. Far too many gullible citizens will assume his latest fiction is real. Such self-serving and politically motivated tub-thumping is, unfortunately, where more thoughtful concerns about the environment are today.

From the July 7 broadcast of KOA's The Mike Rosen Show:

ROSEN: Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. It started on 77 screens across the country. It's now up over 800 screens across the country. It's done a total of about $12 million in a month.

McDANIEL: Yeah.

ROSEN: So it's not the Michael Moore Fahrenheit 9/11 phenomenon, is it?

McDANIEL: No, it's not. But it's actually beginning now to pick up.

ROSEN: Not really. I've been following the numbers on a daily basis, only because it's on more screens. But the numbers are very, very disappointing for the enviro crowd. Really disappointing.

McDANIEL: They're very disappointing.

ROSEN: They thought this would be a cult film, and it isn't.

McDANIEL: No, it definitely --

ROSEN: Breaks my heart.

McDANIEL: Well, see, here's the whole thing with An Inconvenient Truth: It's got Al Gore in it. And the same man who said he invented the Internet, so how much do you trust --

ROSEN: Well, he's also very boring -- Al Gore. And this is like a glorified slide show.