Walled Culture has already written about the two–pronged attack by the copyright industry against the Internet Archive, which was founded by Brewster Kahle, whose Kahle/Austin Foundation supports this blog. The Intercept has an interesting article that reveals another reason why some newspaper publishers are not great fans of the site: The New York Times tried …
This is useful for pointing out if a news site is manipulating a narrative, but for other things, I think news site should get the privacy they need to make stealth edits.
Like:
This was just poor wording. No reason sites shouldn’t have the peace of mind to change poor wording without being called out.
… What? No, if you need to edit poor wording you add a note establishing that the editor missed a section of poor wording, and that section has been revised.
You want to do stealth edits? We call those first drafts, and they arent published. Want to hide your edit history? Edit before you post.
People can make mistakes and miss things you know.
And there is nothing wrong with that, nor is there anything wrong in admitting your mistakes
Nothing wrong with admitting your mistakes, but also seems to me that you should be able to fix them without publicly announcing it.
Not in the news world. Corrections need to be made so people don’t go around spewing nonsense.
EDIT: And those corrections need to be bold and assert themselves. You can’t simply change your words and expect people to find the corrections themselves. That is too much work for the reader, and stating corrections is VERY easy for the publisher.
This. My national news agency publishes corrections like in ye olden days with ye olde telex: separate issue
example would be:
CORRECTION - President denounces war in Israel
BULLETIN - President denounces war in Isral
listed separately, added in their own archives etc.
You would seem to be wrong then lol. News has standards higher than Uncle Joe’s Truckin’ Blog™ or someone’s Aunt’s Facebook post.
Its the New York Times not someones personal blog. If they are publishing sloppy work that is their fault.
You should ad an edit to this comment:
Like this:
Edit:
This is an example where I am objectively wrong and I apologize.
And if you do, you make the edit and add your edit note.
While I agree in theory, it’s hard practically to give the ability to make private wording and typo edits without giving the ability to make more insidious changes - like pushing a certain narrative and then quietly changing words here and there to erase evidence of that after most people have read it, etc.
If news websites kept their own visible audit trail, much like Wikipedia, I could see the argument that Internet Archive doesn’t need to capture these articles immediately, maybe it should be time bound to a year after publication or somesuch, and therefore recent news could retain its paywall by the NYT without being sidestepped by Internet Archive. (While it’s annoying that articles are paywalled, news sites do need to make money and pay for actual news reporters.)
Horseshit. If your editor doesn’t catch the article that says “have the peasants considered suicide as a way out of debt bondage?” then you as a news outlet should absolutely have to live with what you published.
But how do you determine what’s just ‘fixing poor wording’ and what’s actively hiding major bias or retcons of history?
Radio NZ got caught a year or so ago with a staffer who was editing articles syndicated from Reuters to be more pro-Russian. Should they be able to sweep that under the rug and claim it was only ever the one article they got caught on?
Likewise, bin Laden was originally hailed as an anti-Soviet freedom fighter. The articles relating to that are part of the historical record and kinda important.
Allowing the historical record to be retconned with impunity was probably the defining trait of 1984. It’s really not a path you want to go down.
You don’t and there’s no good way to reconcile my two opinions. I don’t disagree the archive should exist, I’m just saying, manipulating information is a valid reason, but the author’s bullying publishers for mistakes isn’t.
Acknowledging literally every change after any news content is published in any context isn’t bullying anyone.
It’s the absolute bare minimum to not be a piece of shit.
There’s an easy way to reconcile them… The opinions are “articles should be backed up to prevent information manipulation, a threat to democracy” and “they should be able to hide their mistakes so they don’t get made fun of”
You reconcile them by not letting them stealth edit, and you stand up for them when they made an honest mistake and are being blasted for it
They wouldn’t be called out if they had left editorial notes, that is what the article is about.
Editing news should require by law an editors note at the bottom what was changed to what like a github commit.
If you cite that shit literally somewhere you could get in trouble for citing wrongly.
You’d be a great employee of the Ministry of Truth
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Oh hey, there’s the relevant bit. This is literally what you’re suggesting.
This is actually a perfect example of why we need to archive these things. Don’t let corporations try to rewrite history wtf