A newspaper vanished from the internet. Did someone pay to kill it?

I repeat, it's hard to find detailed information about a major historical event.

> I think you're confusing "very hard to find details" with "People Don't Agree With Me That This is Important".

Nothingburger, I guess.

> t's a technical and boring financial scandal which was mostly victimless at the level of individuals

Absolutely bonkers statement. Every robosigned document represented an individual whose house was in danger.

> It's just not surprising that this fades from public memory.

It is surprising that the hundreds of articles written about it at the time are gone, and we're getting history from law firm ads. Why is information available on the sites of law firms? Because this was a widespread fraud that affected individuals, and they needed lawyers.

> But that's on all of us, not the recordkeeping.

What?

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Edit: I'm talking about people working to get information removed from the internet, and you're talking about memory. Very few people remember this one woman being raped, so is it "on all of us" that the accused pulled a newspaper off the internet?

Additionally, the robosigning scandal disappearing is just an egregious example that I assumed everyone would be familiar with. There are any number of smaller profile financial scandals involving billions of dollars and huge institutions where the participants are still active in industry and public life. They're often completely obliterated from the web, and you can only find reference to the fallout on ancient sites that have been left on the internet due to neglect, filled with dead links that need to be fished from archive.org.

I also disagree with your categorization of owned vs propaganda. People on HN generally respect NPR as well as many "owned" outlets. WaPo is just notable because Jeff has a history of developing a master plan years in advance where all his components are critical and subtle.

Yeah, so why not one the biggest conflicts of interest there is?

Enough with this tiresome criticism, why not embrace acceptance of the status quo - perhaps with minor complaints here and there?

>Please criticize the work, not the incentives.

The incentives influence the work, including the absense of coverage in certain areas, the softening of some, the framing on others, in self-censorship and "knowing their limits" on the side of the journalists themselves, and all kinds of fuzzy ways that one can't pinpoint on this or that article, but are absolutely there nonetheless.

In any case, media power in hands of unprecendented private business power, is not a good thing, even if the influence is only activated once in a blue moon when it really matters - and even if it's never overt. It's that simple.

"Someone has to own these companies and pay the journalists"? Not really: I'd rather a newsparer is not operating, than owned and paid by the richest man on Earth.

>In this case it seems like a pretty darn good piece of public interest journalism. Do you disagree?

"In this case" it could be, but that's irrelevant. I wrote about the irony of WP covering an "undue rich person's influence on media" story, not whether that particular story is false. Hypocrisy is hypocrisy even if the other person really did the thing you accuse them of.

In fact, one would expect real misdeeds by the owner's rivals to be accurately reported, and bogus stories on non-existing misdeeds by the owner's rivals. What I don't expect is stories on the owner's own (and his friends) misdeeds to be accurately reported, or bogus stories on owner non-misdeeds.

Once it is established that the takedown was either completely legal, or very easily could have been - then my attitude is that spending further resources on a "takedown whodunnit" investigation is about like tracking an escaped horse from the open barn door to the highway, where it was hit and killed by a truck. Beyond a little story to tell, you probably won't have much to show for the effort.

My notion of "doing something" is more about closing the damned barn door, before more horses get out. The Washington Post would need ~zero reporter resources to clearly make that point. Maybe throw in a kudo to some lawmaker who's trying to help on that front, or some old-newspaper-story preservation effort.