Even Out-of-Context Coverage Is Good, Gingrich Concedes

House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said statements he has made in his weekly college lecture have been taken “grotesquely out of context,” but conceded Saturday that even bad coverage has been good.

“Frankly, even the things that were the least in context did send a signal to lots of people: ‘Oh, there’s a course,’ ” Gingrich said in class Saturday. “You in the short run lose some people because they react to one particular quote or one particular statement. You gain in the long run because more people now . . . notice there’s a course, so they get interested.”

Still, Gingrich said he has been “tactically ridiculed” for injecting what appear to be policy statements into his weekly lecture at Reinhardt College in Georgia.

A sampling of remarks from his two-hour lecture Saturday demonstrated it is often difficult to tell the difference between Speaker Gingrich and Prof. Gingrich:

* He blasted the U.S. education and health care systems as models of inefficiency.

* He said the poor will probably be left behind in the Information Age because only wealthy parents can ensure that “their child gets a (personal computer) at 5 years of age, their child is on the Internet, their child gets virtual reality.”

* He wondered whether it’s fair for aborigine children born in the Brazilian rain forest “to not let them have a laptop, not give them a vaccination against polio.”