And What You Can Do About It Now

Connecting the Dots
by Glynn Wilson

During the 1995-96 academic year, I spent most of my time sitting in the Gorgas library at the University of Alabama scanning the New York Times on microfilm and reading stories about the environment along side public opinion polls. I spent a small fortune paying to print those stories for a Master’s thesis looking at how media coverage affects public opinion.

There was no search engine called Google in those early days, and most newspapers had not yet started backing up their stories in online databases such as Lexis-Nexis. So to conduct research, you had to go to the library and pull up old newspapers on microfilm and put change in the machine to print the stories.

The Internet company America Online was just coming on the scene, the Web browser Netscape had just been created, and a conservative convenience store clerk named Matt Drudge had 1,000 subscribers to one of the first e-mail lists. By the fall of 1996, about the time I moved to Milledgeville to teach at Georgia College the year the Olympics came to Atlanta and put up my first Web site, Drudge had started the first “news aggregation” Web site, The Drudge Report.

Bill Clinton was enjoying a great run as president and was reelected in a landslide that fall, in part because the U.S. economy was booming thanks to the dramatic increases in worker productivity due to the personal computer revolution.

Yes, old Bob Dole fell off that stage and didn’t run a great campaign. But a majority of the American people felt the government and the economy were working, so why change? In fact, by the year 1999, the Clinton-Gore administration had wiped out the Reagan budget deficit. Remember the “peace dividend?”

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