The source of the claim was an interview on CNN by Wolf Blitzer on March 9, 1999. Now, one needs to ask how these details lead someone to conclude that the Vice President claimed to have invented the Internet. The challenge for educators is this. We and our students lack the time to track down every nuance of every news story. Matthew Arnold once said that journalism was literature in a hurry.
Speed is important, but never at the expense of accuracy.
The public, and especially our children, deserve better. Identifying misinformation, after all, is not always easy, especially when some of it has the ring of truth. By working with students to develop a reliability index for evaluating Web sites, teachers can help them to be more effective at identifying the most dependable information. Students can also be taught to triangulate their findings like researchers do, and to trace something paraphrased back to the source. In addition, teachers can provide guidance on how to prioritize items that need to be verified to balance time restrictions.