I found this article of something that happened on my birthday from WIRED.com.
Sept. 11, 1998: Starr Report Showcases Net’s Speed
By David Kravets September 11, 2009
12:00 am
Categories: 20th century, Communication, Computers and IT
1998: Sept. 11 is a black day in American history, on at least two counts … this is the other one. Exactly three years before the attacks in New York and Washington, Congress releases the contents of the infamous Starr report on the internet, which leads to the impeachment of a U.S. president.
It’s a significant event, not only in the life of Bill Clinton but also for the unprecedented blending of the media and internet in government transparency.
For the first time, if you didn’t have the net, you were missing history — in this case, the salacious details of the 42nd president’s sexual escapades with 22-year-old White House intern Monica Lewinsky. A lot people missed it. When Congress released the 445-page Starr report, the word blogosphere had yet to be coined and Twitter was still a sound made by birds.
Three months later, the scathing account of executive sexual prowess led to President Clinton’s impeachment. (Clinton was acquitted of all charges, perjury and obstruction of justice, in a Senate trial.)
Formally called the Referral From Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr in Conformity with the Requirement of Title 28, United States Code, Section 595(c), the report’s online debut provided the American public with its first unfiltered access to a current, yet historical, document. (Well, it was almost instant. Government servers kept crashing after the public was required to download the 445-page document in one file.) News outlets scrambled to publish it in pieces.
Equally, the report’s release underscored the power of the internet that was on its way to giving birth to a frenzy of venture funding that included millions invested, or wasted, on the absurd dream of bringing smell to what we once called the World Wide Web.
But as the internet bubble was gurgling, web traffic almost doubled from the previous day when the Starr report was released. According to J.D. Lasica, a social media critic, CNN.com was the first news outlet to post the report, only hours after its being hosted on government servers.
CNN was scoring an as-yet-unheard of 300,000 clicks a minute. MSNBC tallied nearly 2 million hits — a one-day record — and about 20 million people read the report within two days.
While presenting monster technical difficulties for government, web surfers and the media, the report’s online release shed light on what the mainstream media would never publish: the details of Clinton’s sexual escapades in the White House that led to the first perjury and obstruction charges against a sitting U.S. president since the 19th century.
Traditional media, meanwhile, danced around the lurid details. The Washington Post, for example, simply ran the transcript of Starr’s report without discussing any of the specifics. It did provide an editor’s note: “Some of the language in these documents is sexually explicit.” Countless other news outlets issued similar warnings.
Today, with the enormous influence of the internet, mainstream media might be more inclined to tell all. Yet, it’s doubtful that even now we would find the word “cigar” used in that context in a newspaper headline or a TV video stream.
Source: OIC
Top Photo: This Official White House photo taken Nov. 17, 1995, from page 3179 of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr’s report on President Clinton, showing President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky at the White House.
