To date, Gore has never denied inventing the Internet!
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue5_10/wiggins/Although Al Gore never claimed to have invented the Internet, he did discuss his role in Internet development in an interview with Wolf Blitzer of Cable News Network. The interview took place on March 9, 1999 during CNN's "Late Edition" show. Specifically, what Gore said was "I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
A cynic might observe that "creating the Internet" and "inventing the Internet" are tantamount to the same exaggeration. But let's look at the entire quote in the context of the colloquy with Blitzer. Here is Blitzer's entire query to Gore:
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?
Clearly, Blitzer is asking Gore to offer an explanation of how he differs as a politician from other politicians in general, and his rival at the time, Bill Bradley, in particular. Here is Gore's entire response to Blitzer's question:
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.
During a quarter century of public service, including most of it long before I came into my current job, I have worked to try to improve the quality of life in our country and in our world. And what I've seen during that experience is an emerging future that's very exciting, about which I'm very optimistic, and toward which I want to lead.
Here Gore appears to have been caught off guard a bit by the question, rambling a bit as he seeks to vocalize a responsive answer. He emphasizes his work during his years in the Congress - Gore served in the House and later the Senate - as well as his leadership on various issues. Perhaps not showing the most elegant variation in words, he mentions "initiative" three times. Clearly his overall message is that he worked hard on a number of issues, and took a leadership position relative to others - presumably including his rival Bradley. The overall thrust is that Gore paints himself as a forward-looking legislator and political leader.
The rest of the interview dealt with George Bush and Elizabeth Dole as potential rivals, with Clinton proposals for community policing, with the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, and with the notion of engagement with China. If Blitzer thought he had caught Gore in a gaffe, he did not take note of it during the interview.
But if Blitzer didn't notice (or try to exploit) the gaffe, the rest of the press had a field day. Articles and television coverage ridiculed Gore's statement. Most of these reports covered the issue rather lightly, and dismissing the veracity of Gore's remark with a superficial statement along the lines that "The Internet was invented in the late 1960s" or "The Internet was invented in 1969."
