Bad Reporting and the Internet

* Re “Abe Lincoln and the Truth Get Mugged at the Click of a Mouse,” Commentary, April 1: Doris Kearns Goodwin comments, “In our modern world, as I recently discovered to my chagrin, information travels not at the speed of horse and rider but at the speed of light.”

Where has she been the last decade or two? Bad and hurried reporting in a competitive society isn’t something new because of the Internet; it has always been with us. However, isn’t it better to find out a falsehood in a matters of hours (thanks to computers and the Internet) rather than finding out a falsehood in a matter of days or weeks with the print media?

Ms. Goodwin, we already knew, days ago, what you said in your Times article. Somebody simply made a mistake and should apologize. Seems like no big deal to me.

R.V. BREOR

Van Nuys

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* I doubt that anyone who has watched Goodwin on television would ever label her a partisan, and she is right to bemoan her fate at the hands of rumormongers. However, Goodwin could have had any other filmmaker option her book rather than one who is so closely associated with the Democratic Party [Steven Spielberg] and the malodorous Clinton reign.

As Abe himself once said, “What kills a skunk is the publicity it gives itself.”

LORNA M. DOBSON

Providence, R.I.

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* It seems odd to me that I have to write to a publication 3,000 miles away to comment about a person who lives about 100 miles away. I guess that is really what Goodwin was talking about. What’s odder than that is the virtual mugging she received over some false reporting by the London Times and its subsequent rehash by various forms of electronic media.

For me, it’s really a matter of trust. Whom would you trust, a cyber geek who cuts and pastes to his Web site anything that appears on his monitor? Or a political hack with a three-hour radio show? No, I don’t think I’d trust those folks. I’d put my trust in Goodwin, an author, a scholar and an all-around great American.

MARC VALLIERES

Keene, N.H.