Comment by jessaustin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jessaustin | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Do you mind going into more detail here? Why is removal not acceptable? If someone was slandered, why is it better to leave that slander in place with disclaimers? If it's better from the perspective of journalism, does that conflict with what's better from the perspective of not being sued?

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.

> Why is removal not acceptable?

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.

The difference is that the existence of your bug in source code form harms no one. But the existence of an unethically reported story, even with a correction, can cause real harm. Using your analogy, your proposed correction would be to leave the bug in production, but give some "Hey, sorry, we made a mistake" message.

> existence of an unethically reported story, even with a correction, can cause real harm

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.

I find it bizarre that you continue insisting that they are not owning up to their mistakes. They have clearly said the reporting was bad, their editors didn't catch it, and it's their fault. Removing the story is not "covering up." It is mitigating the harm they caused.

First, "don't make mistakes" is a policy so idiotic in its conception that I don't think there exists a good-faith argument for advocating for it.

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.

Except it eliminates so much context as to make the apology meaningless. Unless you knew about the existence of the pre-delete story, all you know is that the story used to be one thing, now it's "NPR fucked up".

What? Retraction: the action of drawing something back or back in. If something is entirely incorrect and someone is trying to produce truthful content, admission and removal is entirely acceptable.

Besides, it very may well have been demanded by their legal department to avoid any repercussions from the mischaracterized party.

If they kept the original story with a huge correction/retratction notice and all associated details, anyone who read the original could find it again.

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.

Right, but you definitely remove that line from operation, which is exactly what they did. Go to an archive site or glean more details from the ombudsman post. NPR's website doesn't need to be a VCS of every change to history, much like your production environment doesn't need to have the entire historical tree attached to it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com