<
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/10/25/ny-times-tried-to-block-the-internet-archive/>
"
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 to block a web crawler that was affiliated with
the famous Internet Archive, a project whose easy-to-use comparisons of
article versions has sometimes led to embarrassment for the newspaper.
As the article explains, one of the important uses of the Internet Archive’s
Wayback Machine is to compare Web pages as they are updated over time. It
allows the differences between the original and later versions of a page to be
identified. In particular, this feature can be used to spot changes in news
stories that have been made without any accompanying editorial notes, so-called
stealth edits. Here’s why that has been awkward for
The New York Times:
The Times has, in the past, faced public criticisms over some of its
stealth edits. In a notorious 2016 incident, the paper revised an article
about then-Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., so
drastically after publication — changing the tone from one of praise to
skepticism — that it came in for a round of opprobrium from other outlets as
well as the Times’s own public editor. The blogger who first noticed the
revisions and set off the firestorm demonstrated the changes by using the
Wayback Machine.
More recently, the Times stealth-edited an article that originally listed
“death” as one of six ways “you can still cancel your federal student loan
debt.” Following the edit, the “death” section title was changed to a more
opaque heading of “debt won’t carry on.”
This is not something that serious newspapers should do. If they make changes,
they should flag them up so that people can see what has changed. This is also
an opportunity for them to justify changing the text. Stealth edits suggest
that there was no good reason for changing things, other than trying to cover
up a blunder or infelicity in the original version."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
