But they published it. They should not remove it. Publish a correction. Removal is not acceptable.
There's an interesting tension between this argument and the ostensible topic of the original story, "the right to be forgotten". [0] Does Ervine really have a right to see that personal criticisms of his conduct are removed from the Google? Does the person who criticized him have a right to see a one-sided account of his life removed from NPR? I almost admire NPR enough to suspect that they're doing all this as an exercise in ironic criticism (which the ombudsman linked elsewhere attempts to lampshade), but I can't quite get there.
[0] "Ostensible" because the original was mostly a clumsy, credulous submarine for a toxic rich dude's latest scam venture, along with some additional knife-twisting on some poor immigrant the rich dude had gotten sentenced to federal prison.
Because once published, you must stand by what you published. Accept your mistake. Put a big notice on it saying how sorry you are and how much more careful you will be in future. Hiding it is running from it.
> If it's better from the perspective of journalism, does that conflict with what's better from the perspective of not being sued?
It's all about how much these "journalists" respect their own profession. If I commit a horrible bug, I don't go and purge it from github using --force. I leave it there as a reminder and acceptance of my mistake.
Yes some professions have bigger consequences for mistakes. If you can't deal with it go do something else. Not an excuse for covering up your mistake. This is downright Orwellian.
Second, a "cover-up" is when you hide evidence of your past misconduct. Pleading guilty in public is in every possible way the literal opposite of covering something up. If they'd just deleted the article with no commentary at all, that's covering up the mistake. Leaving the original URL up with a notice that they erred in publishing the original story isn't.
Besides, it very may well have been demanded by their legal department to avoid any repercussions from the mischaracterized party.
As it stands now, anyone who doesn't happen to catch this will have no way of finding out in the future that the story they read may have been partially or wholly false.
I don't like the idea of erasing history this way.
By presenting us the full-picture, we can potentially guard ourselves in the future.
> Editor's note on April 11, 2018: NPR has retracted the story that was previously on this page because it did not meet our standards. "Fairness" is one of our guiding principles, and to that end we have pledged to "make every effort to gather responses from those who are the subjects of criticism." In this instance, that did not happen.
So how does this not count as owning up to mistakes and accepting responsibility?
Your analogy with a git commit/`push --force` is flawed. In software, the end user is not at risk (without much deliberative effort) of running the buggy commit. In journalism, the article content is the actual end user product, and grievously erroneous content causes actual harm. Moreover, the mistakes that NPR admits to making were not just a "buggy" commit. It was the equivalent of checking in malware from the very first commit.