Public Domain

* WISDOM TROVE *

1:I want the public as well as libraries and schools to enjoy unlimited access to public-domain books. This means no charges for these kind of texts themselves. ~ tom-peters, @wisdomtrove

2:A vibrant, rich, growing corpus of public-domain books is a vital public good - similar to parks, the infrastructure of basic services, and other hallmarks of any advanced society. ~ tom-peters, @wisdomtrove

3:We have a right to expect that the best trained, the best educated men on the Pacific slope, the Rocky Mountains, and great plains States will take the lead in the preservation and right use of forests, in securing the right use of waters, and in seeing that our land policy is not twisted from its original purpose, but is perpetuated by amendment, by change when such change is necessary in the life of that purpose, the purpose being to turn the public domain into farms each to be the property of the man who actually tills it and makes his home in it. ~ theodore-roosevelt, @wisdomtrove

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1:All of the great Disney works took works that were in the public domain and remixed them. ~ Lawrence Lessig,

2:and illustrations are in the public domain and are free to use, reproduce, or alter as desired. Cover and ~ Lewis Carroll,

3:There are goods that are outside trade and in the public domain and that should be reserved and protected. ~ Christine Lagarde,

4:Mickey Mouse should be in the public domain by now. What a better world it would be if other people were doing things with Mickey Mouse! ~ Lloyd Kaufman,

5:free market required public regulation to keep predatory finance and rent seeking in check, and to keep basic infastructure in the public domain. ~ Michael Hudson,

6:I want the public as well as libraries and schools to enjoy unlimited access to public-domain books. This means no charges for these kind of texts themselves. ~ Tom Peters,

7:After all, the internet originated around 1960 and wasn't privatized until 1995. That's thirty five years in the public domain during the hard, creative development period. ~ Noam Chomsky,

8:English translations of most of the texts are found in the Sacred Books of the East series (1879–1910), which is now in the public domain and easily accessible online. ~ Stephen E Flowers,

9:A vibrant, rich, growing corpus of public-domain books is a vital public good - similar to parks, the infrastructure of basic services, and other hallmarks of any advanced society. ~ Tom Peters,

10:Women's bodies are public domain, as evidenced clearly at the present time by the furor over abortion. Everyone has an opinion about what a woman should or should not do with her body. ~ Maureen Murdock,

11:The movie stars and matinee idols are put into the public domain by photography. They become dreams that money can buy. They can be bought and thumbed more easily than public prostitutes. ~ Marshall McLuhan,

12:other incursions of new intellectual property laws into the public domain. Tim's long-term vision for his company is to change the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators. For everything ~ Tim O Reilly,

13:It's in the public domain. That's one of the reasons I do it so much. But luckily, it's a brilliant film [ Night Of The Living Dead]. Every horror aficionado must see that film at least once. ~ Cassandra Peterson,

14:The Eurozone die is cast. Countries must withdraw from the euro so that governments can create their own money once again, and resist creditor demands to carve up and privatize their public domain. ~ Michael Hudson,

15:By the time Apple's Macintosh operating system finally falls into the public domain, there will be no machine that could possibly run it. The term of copyright for software is effectively unlimited. ~ Lawrence Lessig,

16:If you were unfamiliar with the political situation in our country, you might think you were witnessing not the machinations of a democracy but the final surrender of personal consciousness into the public domain. ~ Rachel Cusk,

17:History of the Great American Fortunes uncovered how many family fortunes were taken from the public domain by colonial land grants, bribery and insider dealing – and how such fortunes quickly take a financial form. ~ Michael Hudson,

18:In the past, people could use their music because there are these bootlegs floating around that were supposedly public domain but they weren't, and now they've locked everything up and it's become really near impossible to use their music in movies. ~ George Ratliff,

19:The myth is the public domain and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group. If it isn't, you've got a long adventure in the dark forest ahead of you. ~ Joseph Campbell,

20:A public domain work is an orphan. No one is responsible for its life. But everyone exploits its use, until that time certain when it becomes soiled and haggard, barren of its previous virtues. How does the consumer benefit from the steady decline of a film's quality? ~ Jack Valenti,

21:My heart goes out to the Lindsay Lohans and Britneys who have really had childhood taken from them and probably missed important developmental steps. They have become sort of "public domain" and something to be made money on. There's no sense of self there, I'm sure of it. ~ Genie Francis,

22:One theme of what I've been writing has been to get people to understand that "apolitical" means "you lose." It doesn't mean you live a utopian life free of politicians' influence. The destruction of the public domain is the clearest example, but it will only be the first. ~ Lawrence Lessig,

23:finance was to become a public utility, situated in the public domain or at least alongside a public banking option. Instead, the past century’s expansion of predatory credit has been reinforced by de-taxing interest, land rent, financial speculation, debt leveraging and “capital” (asset-price) gains. ~ Michael Hudson,

24:There are now, to the delight of parasitical writers like me, what I might almost call “public domain” plot items. There are dragons, and magic users, and far horizons, and quests, and items of power, and weird cities. There’s the kind of scenery that we would have had on earth if only God had had the money. ~ Terry Pratchett,

25:'Freeing' a literary work into the public domain is less a public benefit than a transfer of wealth from the families of American writers to the executives and stockholders of various businesses who will continue to profit from, for example, 'The Garden Party,' while the descendants of Katherine Mansfield will not. ~ Mark Helprin,

26:In the West, when all of these reactors, nuclear reactors, are matters...part of the public domain, there are all kinds of supervision over them. We see that the ecological movement, environmentalist movement, organizes all kinds of demonstrations against these. They lie on railroads, they tie themselves to the gates. ~ Akbar Ganji,

27:Our public officials have forgotten that they are ultimately accountable to the people who put them in office, that the information they keep in secrecy belongs to all of us. Julian Assange took a courageous step by rightfully returning what belongs to the public domain. For that reason, I believe we need to stand behind him. ~ Yoko Ono,

28:The reading occupied the attention that she had formerly given to gossip about sweethearts and the experimental retreats that she would go through with her girl friends, not because it was imposed as discipline but because she had lost all interest by then in talking about mysteries that were in the public domain. ~ Gabriel Garc a M rquez,

29:Only when he has published his ideas and findings has the scientist made his contribution, and only when he has thus made it part of the public domain of scholarship can he truly lay claim to it as his own. For his claim resides only in the recognition accorded by peers in the social system of science through reference to his work. ~ Robert K Merton,

30:Therefore internal debates and bickering continue and inevitably flow into the public domain, confounding the existing confusion. Rajiv Gandhi had once said that intelligence organisations could not be treated like the rest of the bureaucracy. It is time the government settled these issues once and for all—who better to do it than Prime Minister Modi. ~ A S Dulat,

31:the demands of the scientific method. Before his colleagues would allow him to put a scientific paper into the public domain, they tore into his ideas, challenging his premises, doubting his methods and questioning his ability. It never occurred to Singh that he could sue a critic of his work, even if the criticism was damaging to his reputation or wholly misguided. ~ Nick Cohen,

32:Even thought this is a remarkable story [The danish Girl] and these are two fascinating people in their own right, Lili's story had been in the public domain but this had somehow slipped out of sight. It seemed bizarre then but I couldn't have imagined releasing the film in a climate like today around trans issues and the comfort people have about it in the public eye. ~ Lucinda Coxon,

33:I have a piano in my living room that I mess around on a little bit and when I asked Len if I could find a piece of music, I went through a **** load of classical music to find something that I felt had a certain urgency to it, but also with a hint of melancholia and maybe a sense of longing. I found that which is public domain and I had a piano teacher to go through it with me. ~ Colin Farrell,

34:In the seventy years since von Neumann effectively placed his “Draft Report” on the EDVAC into the public domain, the trend for computers has been, with a few notable exceptions, toward a more proprietary approach. In 2011 a milestone was reached: Apple and Google spent more on lawsuits and payments involving patents than they did on research and development of new products.64 ~ Walter Isaacson,

35:All manners of freedom, including freedom of expression, freedom of conscious, freedom of thought...it accepts tolerance. But it is not an atheist society. Religion is the private affair of an individual...be present in the public domain, but state has to be clearly separated from religion. When I'm speaking, I'm speaking only for myself. At the same time, I know that these ideas have wide support among the Iranian population. ~ Akbar Ganji,

36:In particular, the State has arrogated to itself a compulsory monopoly over police and military services, the provision of law, judicial decision-making, the mint and the power to create money, unused land ("the public domain"), streets and highways, rivers and coastal waters, and the means of delivering mail...the State relies on control of the levers of propaganda to persuade its subjects to obey or even exalt their rulers. ~ Murray N Rothbard,

37:Creativity builds upon the public domain. The battle that we're fighting now is about whether the public domain will continue to be fed by creative works after their copyright expires. That has been our tradition but that tradition has been perverted in the last generation. We're trying to use the Constitution to reestablish what has always been taken for granted--that the public domain would grow each year with new creative work. ~ Lawrence Lessig,

38:In a 2006 article in Management Science, Alan MacCormack and Carliss Baldwin document an example of a product that successfully evolved from an integral to a modular architecture.21 When the software was put into the public domain as open source, the commercial firm that owned the copyright invested significant resources to make the transition. This was critical because the software could not have been maintained by distributed teams of volunteer developers if it had not been broken into smaller subsystems. ~ Geoffrey G Parker,

39:Much of the early engineering development of digital computers was done in universities. A few years ago, the view was commonly expressed that universities had played their part in computer design, and that the matter could now safely be left to industry. [...] Apart from the obvious functions of keeping in the public domain material that might otherwise be hidden, universities can make a special contribution by reason of their freedom from commercial considerations, including freedom from the need to follow the fashion. ~ Maurice Wilkes,

40:We have a right to expect that the best trained, the best educated men on the Pacific slope, the Rocky Mountains, and great plains States will take the lead in the preservation and right use of forests, in securing the right use of waters, and in seeing that our land policy is not twisted from its original purpose, but is perpetuated by amendment, by change when such change is necessary in the life of that purpose, the purpose being to turn the public domain into farms each to be the property of the man who actually tills it and makes his home in it. ~ Theodore Roosevelt,

41:Yet his feeling of distance, the need he felt to stay silent and to keep his views on what he had read, seen, or thought about to himself without immediately firing them off into the public domain in exchange for a fee, increased with every year that passed. He preferred to express this wish in an off-hand and matter-of-fact way (after all, being an author was a way of life!) rather than load it with pathos, but even so what lay at the heart of this was a concern for the nature of the word and a desire to protect it from devaluation through inflationary overuse. ~ Hermann Hesse,

42:So far, the items on that list of brain differences that are thought to explain the gender status quo have always, in the end been crossed off. But before this happens, speculation becomes elevated to the status of fact, especially in the hands of some popular writers. Once in the public domain these supposed facts about male and female brains become part of the culture, often lingering on well past their best-by dates. Here they reinforce and legitimate the gender stereotypes that interact with our minds, helping to create the very gender inequalities that the neuroscientific claims seek to explain. ~ Cordelia Fine,

43:Chanukah In this Sicha, the Rebbe explains the Mitzvah of the Chanukah lights, and concentrates on two of their features, that they are to be placed by the door of one’s house that is adjacent to the street, or the public domain, and that they must be placed on the left-hand side of the door. These features have a deep symbolism: The “left-hand side” and the “public domain” both stand for the realm of the profane, and by placing the lights there, we are, as it were, bringing the Divine light into the area of existence which is normally most resistant to it. The Sicha goes on to explain the difference between the positive and negative commandments in their effect on the world, and concludes with a comparison between the Chanukah lights and tefillin. ~ Menachem M Schneerson,

44:The Lord's Creation is like Agarwood, when touched by man (i.e., mould) it becomes infected; as the infection progresses, the Creation produces magic in response to the attack, which only the observant attentive believer can pick up the traces thereof. The purity of that Elixir depends on how it is being distilled from the Agarwood (i.e., The Lord's Creation) by the faithful; the more believing she/he is, the more miraculous the testimony becomes. And only by striving can the incense be extracted into the air (i.e., the public domain) for that its release requires the adequate amount of inquisitive energy to be exerted - that's where the scholar's role lies. Disbelief, however, is touched only by the smoke triggering thereby, disease. Therefore, the Agarwood (i.e., The Lord’s Creation) was given to serve man for that without man’s interaction with it, there would be no magic to extract. ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim,

45:be rich?” As Cailliau recalled, his initial reaction was “Well, it helps, no?”27 That was the incorrect response. “He apparently didn’t care about that,” Cailliau realized. “Tim’s not in it for the money. He accepts a much wider range of hotel-room facilities than a CEO would.”28 Instead Berners-Lee insisted that the Web protocols should be made available freely, shared openly, and put forever in the public domain. After all, the whole point of the Web, and the essence of its design, was to promote sharing and collaboration. CERN issued a document declaring that it “relinquishes all intellectual property rights to this code, both source and binary form, and permission is granted for anyone to use, duplicate, modify, and redistribute it.”29 Eventually CERN joined forces with Richard Stallman and adopted his GNU General Public License. The result was one of the grandest free and open-source projects in history. That approach reflected Berners-Lee’s self-effacing style. He was averse to ~ Walter Isaacson,

46:If this is so, then the placement of the Mishkan at the heart of the camp suggests that societies need, in the public domain, a constant reminder of the presence of God. That, after all, is why the Mishkan appears in Exodus, not Genesis. Genesis is about individuals, Exodus about societies. Significant thinkers believed likewise. John Locke, the pioneer of toleration, thought so. He considered that atheists were ineligible for English citizenship since membership was gained by swearing an oath of allegiance, and an oath, being a vow to God, could not be sworn by an atheist.[10] In his farewell address, George Washington said: Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports…let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.[11 ~ Jonathan Sacks,

47:The Rules of Misquotation: Axiom 1. Any quotation that can be altered will be. Corollary 1A: Vivid words hook misquotes in the mind. ~ Corollary 1B: Numbers are hard to keep straight. ~ Corollary 1C: Small changes can have a big impact (or: what a difference an a makes). ~ Corollary 1D: If noted figures don't say what needs to be said, we'll say it for them. ~ Corollary 1E: Journalists are a less than dependable source of accurate quotes. Corollary 1F: Famous dead people make excellent commentators on current events. Axiom 2. Famous quotes need famous mouths. ~ Corollary 2A: Well-known messengers get credit for clever comments they report from less celebrated mouths. ~ Corollary 2B: Particularly quotable figures receive more than their share of quotable quotes. ~ Corollary 2C: Comments made about someone might as well have been said by that person. ~ Corollary 2D: Who you think said something may depend on where you live. ~ Corollary 2E: Vintage quotes are considered to be in the public domain. Corollary 2F: In a pinch, any orphan quote can be called a Chinese proverb. ~ Ralph Keyes, "Nice Guys Finish Seventh": False Phrases, Spurious Sayings, and Familiar Misquotations (1992) ISBN 0062700200.,

48:Sexual harassment is material. It is a network that stops information from getting out. It is a set of alliances that come alive to stop something; that enable a complaint to be held up or to become confidential, so that it never comes out into the public domain. And notice here: so many complex things are going on at the same time. It is not activity that is coordinated by one person or even necessarily a group of people who are meeting in secret, although secret meetings probably do happen. All of these activities, however complex, sustain a direction; they have a point. Direction does not require something to originate from a single point: in fact a direction is achieved through consistency between points that do not seem to meet. Things combine to achieve something that is solid and tangible; bonds become binds. If one element does not hold, or become binding, another element holds or binds. The process is rather like the cement used to make walls: something is set into a holding pattern. The setting is what hardens. Perhaps when people notice the complexity, or even the inefficiency and disorganization, they don’t notice the cement. When you say there is a pattern, you are heard as paranoid, as if you are imagining that all this complexity derives from a single point. ~ Sara Ahmed,

49:The articles were true,” Myron said. “And you’ve known it all along.” “What we did or did not know is not your concern.” Myron shook his head. “Unbelievable,” he said. “So let me see if I got this straight. You have a serial psycho out there who snatches people out of the blue and torments their families. You want to keep a lid on it because if word got out to the public, you’d have a panic situation. Then the psycho goes directly to Stan Gibbs and suddenly the story is in the public domain …” Myron’s voice died off, seeing that his logic trail had hit a major pothole. He frowned and forged ahead. “I don’t know how that old novel or the plagiarism charges tie in. But either way, you decided to ride it. You let Gibbs get fired and disgraced, probably in part because you were pissed off that he upset your investigation. But mostly”—he spotted what he thought was a clearing—“but mostly you did it so you could watch him. If the psycho contacted him once, you figured, he’d probably do it again—especially if the articles had been discredited.” Kimberly Green said, “Wrong.” “But close.” “No.” “The kidnappings Gibbs wrote about took place, right?” She hesitated, gave Ford an eye check. “We can’t verify all of his facts.” “Jesus, I’m not taking a deposition here,” Myron said. “Was his column true, yes or no?” “We’ve told you enough,” she said. “It’s your turn.” “You haven’t told me squat. ~ Harlan Coben,

50:Whether an activity is performed in private or in public is by no means a matter of indifference. Obviously, the character of the public realm must change in accordance with the activities admitted into it, but to a large extent the activity itself changes its own nature too. The laboring activity, though under all circumstances connected with the life process in its most elementary, biological sense, remained stationary for thousands of years, imprisoned in the eternal recurrence of the life process to which it was tied. The admission of labor to public stature, far from eliminating its character as a process—which one might have expected, remembering that bodies politic have always been designed for permanence and their laws always understood as limitations imposed upon movement—has, on the contrary, liberated this process from its circular, monotonous recurrence and transformed it into a swiftly progressing development whose results have in a few centuries totally changed the whole inhabited world. The moment laboring was liberated from the restrictions imposed by its banishment into the private realm—and this emancipation of labor was not a consequence of the emancipation of the working class, but preceded it—it was as though the growth element inherent in all organic life had completely overcome and overgrown the processes of decay by which organic life is checked and balanced in nature’s household. The social realm, where the life process has established its own public domain, has let loose an unnatural growth, so to speak, of the natural; and it is against this growth, not merely against society but against a constantly growing social realm, that the private and intimate, on the one hand, and the political (in the narrower sense of the word), on the other, have proved incapable of defending themselves. What ~ Hannah Arendt,

51:Dear Net-Mail User [ EweR-635-78-2267-3 aSp]: Your mailbox has just been rifled by EmilyPost, an autonomous courtesy-worm chain program released in October 2036 by an anonymous group of net subscribers in western Alaska. [ ref: sequestered confession 592864-2376298.98634, deposited with Bank Leumi 10/23/36:20:34:21. Expiration-disclosure 10 years.] Under the civil disobedience sections of the Charter of Rio, we accept in advance the fines and penalties that will come due when our confession is released in 2046. However we feel that’s a small price to pay for the message brought to you by EmilyPost. In brief, dear friend, you are not a very polite person. EmilyPost’s syntax analysis subroutines show that a very high fraction of your Net exchanges are heated, vituperative, even obscene. Of course you enjoy free speech. But EmilyPost has been designed by people who are concerned about the recent trend toward excessive nastiness in some parts of the Net. EmilyPost homes in on folks like you and begins by asking them to please consider the advantages of politeness. For one thing, your credibility ratings would rise. (EmilyPost has checked your favorite bulletin boards, and finds your ratings aren’t high at all. Nobody is listening to you, sir!) Moreover, consider that courtesy can foster calm reason, turning shrill antagonism into useful debate and even consensus. We suggest introducing an automatic delay to your mail system. Communications are so fast these days, people seldom stop and think. Some Net users act like mental patients who shout out anything that comes to mind, rather than as functioning citizens with the human gift of tact. If you wish, you may use one of the public-domain delay programs included in this version of EmilyPost, free of charge. Of course, should you insist on continuing as before, disseminating nastiness in all directions, we have equipped EmilyPost with other options you’ll soon find out about… ~ David Brin,

52:Man's sole Magic Wand in Science is observation using the five senses; any other function/tool used to produce illusions to the same data and information is that of the Occult using Esotery. After all, processing the data (i.e., mental activity that produces information) is an upper layer to that of its radiation (i.e., emission/active or reception/passive); and since esotery erroneously claim to transcend the lower layers (of data transfer and information assembly/disassembly) and enables access directly onto the spiritual realms (termed as, Consciousness) without resorting to that authentic Magic Wand for acquiring 'objects of study', the data needed will ultimately be rendered into self-generated artifacts using such a shenanigan. In other words, the Occult comprises practices and techniques using artifacts delivered by the use of Esotery for the aim of constructing some delusion of Science; this is when innocent Magic turns into Sorcery. It is the process of enforcing subjectivity rather than objectivity onto its participants and accomplices for maintaining a discipline that facilitates for spirituality to lurk into the public domain (including that of secret societies) under the pretense of being part of some universal reality rather than an individual experience confined to each person's private sphere separately. Politically speaking, it is the nastiest flavor of Socialism in action; the assault on the ownership of souls to socially modify man instead of scientifically modify the environment. It is hence just another ideology of Social Engineering which is specifically shared by the children of Gaia/Isis/whatever, and only by holding onto the principle of 'Family' as an abstract model of an atomic element in society, is one able to escape this unscientific spiritual redistribution of souls. Remember that Science is the tool which man her-/himself has developed to harvest nature for her/his own service and not vice versa! ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim,

53:Imagine for a moment that you are the proud owner of a large house which you have spent years of your life painting and decorating and filling with everything you love. It's your home. It's something you've made your own, something for you to be remembered by, something that, perhaps years later, your children and grandchildren can visit and get a view of your life in. It's part of your creativity, your hard work... it's your property.

Now suppose you decide to go camping for a couple of weeks. You lock your door and assume that nobody is going to break in... but they do, and when you return home, to your horror you find that not only do these trespassers break in, but they also have quite uniquely imaginative ways of disrespecting, vandalizing and corrupting everything within your property. They light fires on your lawn, your topiary hedges are in heaps of black ashes. There's some blatantly obscene graffiti splattered across your front door, offensive images and rude words splashed on the walls and windows. Your television has been tipped over. Your photographs of family and friends have had the heads cut out of them. There's mold growing in the refrigerator, bottles of booze tipped over on the table, and cigarette smoke embedded into the carpeting. Your beloved houseplants are dead, your furniture has been stripped down and ruined. Basically, the thing you've spent years working for and creating within your lifetime has been tampered with to the point where it is just a grim joke.

So, I feel terrible for poor Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Jane Austen and Lewis Carroll, who must be spinning in their graves since they have no rights to their own works of fiction anymore. I'm all for readers being able to read books for free once and only when the deceased author's copyright eventually ends. Still though, did Doyle ever think in a million years that his wonderful characters would be dragged through the mud of every pervy fanfiction that the sick internet geek can think of to create? Did Carroll ever suspect that Alice and the Hatter would become freakish clown-like goth caricatures in Tim Burton's CGI-infested films? Would Austen really want her writing to be sold as badly-formatted ebooks?

The sharing of this Public Domain content isn't really an issue. Stories are meant to be told, meant to echo onward forever. That's what makes them magical. That being said, in the Information Age, there's a real lack of respect towards the creators of this original content. If, when I've been dead for 70 years and I then no longer have the rights to my novels, somebody gets the bright idea of doing anything funny with any of those novels, my ghost is going to rise from the grave and do some serious ass-kicking. ~ Rebecca McNutt,

54:Information or allegations reflecting negatively on individuals or groups seen less sympathetically by the intelligentsia pass rapidly into the public domain with little scrutiny and much publicity. Two of the biggest proven hoaxes of our time have involved allegations of white men gang-raping a black woman-- first the Tawana Brawley hoax of 1987 and later the false rape charges against three Duke University students in 2006. In both cases, editorial indignation rang out across the land, without a speck of evidence to substantiate either of these charges. Moreover, the denunciations were not limited to the particular men accused, but were often extended to society at large, of whom these men were deemed to be symptoms or 'the tip of the iceberg.' In both cases, the charges fit a pre-existing vision, and that apparently made mundane facts unnecessary.

Another widely publicized hoax-- one to which the President of the United States added his sub-hoax-- was a 1996 story appearing in USA Today under the headline, 'Arson at Black Churches Echoes Bigotry of the Past.' There was, according to USA Today, 'an epidemic of church burning,' targeting black churches. Like the gang-rape hoaxes, this story spread rapidly through the media. The Chicago Tribune referred to 'an epidemic of criminal and cowardly arson' leaving black churches in ruins.

As with the gang-rape hoaxes, comments on the church fire stories went beyond those who were supposed to have set these fires to blame forces at work in society at large. Jesse Jackson was quoted was quoted in the New York Times as calling these arsons part of a 'cultural conspiracy' against blacks, which 'reflected the heightened racial tensions in the south that have been exacerbated by the assault on affirmative action and the populist oratory of Republican politicians like Pat Buchanan.' Time magazine writer Jack White likewise blamed 'the coded phrases' of Republican leaders for 'encouraging the arsonists.' Columnist Barbara Reynolds of USA Today said that the fires were 'an attempt to murder the spirit of black America.' New York Times columnist Bob Herbert said, "The fuel for these fires can be traced to a carefully crafted environment of bigotry and hatred that was developed over the last century.'

As with the gang-rape hoaxes, the charges publicized were taken as reflecting on the whole society, not just those supposedly involved in what was widely presumed to be arson, rather than fires that break out for a variety of other reasons. Washington Post columnist Dorothy Gilliam said that society in effect was 'giving these arsonists permission to commit these horrible crimes.' The climax of these comments came when President Bill Clinton, in his weekly radio address, said that these church burnings recalled similar burnings of black churches in Arkansas when he was a boy. There were more that 2,000 media stories done on the subject after the President's address.

This story began to unravel when factual research showed that (1) no black churches were burned in Arkansas when Bill Clinton was growing up, (2) there had been no increase in fires at black churches, but an actual decrease over the previous 15 years, (3) the incidence of fires at white churches was similar to the incidence of fires at black churches, and (4) where there was arson, one-third of the suspects were black. However, retractions of the original story-- where there were retractions at all-- typically were given far less prominence than the original banner headlines and heated editorial comments. ~ Thomas Sowell,

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