New York Times silently edits its "lost all credibility" line | Hacker News Reader

New York Times silently edits its "lost all credibility" line

newsdiffs.org

139 pointsslapshot31 comments

They just added "on this issue" to it. Doesn't seem to be a big deal - they are just making bit more explicit what was already implied. It would be different if they had removed the line completely or changed their stance 180 degree.

Yes. Looking over the changes, I honestly only see attempts at making it more explicit.

Which in itself could mean they were initially eager to release it (instead of letting it rot on a shelf or something), and/or that it was written with a hot pen, if you know what I mean. "Lost all credibility" [on everything ever] is something I might say, but it's not something I would expect to read in a decent newspaper. Someone got a bit emotional over this and I salute them for that; that they later decided to be a bit more smart and effective about it doesn't take anything away, it just adds to it.

edit/addendum: Just consider what it would literally mean, he lost crediblity on everything; a feast for any and all republicans, for starters. I mean, does this mean gay marriage was a mistake, too? Some would happily use this as water on their mills with unrelated issues.

I think it's really weird to say that someone has lost all credibility on this issue. I mean, credibility is something that applies to people and entities, not to issues.

Read more carefully -- they're talking about the administration, not the person.

There's no reason that this diminishes their credibility on, say, health care reform. It's a totally different set of people, and a fundamentally different agenda.

I know that even people who lie a LOT (compulsory style) can sometimes be trusted to give truthful answers on things they feel confident (if not proud) about and are knowledgeable in and have a healthy attidude towards. I don't trust Obama on things like police states or killing people with robots, but I have zero idea what he knows about gardening. I personally know nothing, and if he gave me advice on it I would initially trust him.

If this is a stupid thought process I apologize, I am slightly sleep deprived.

I agree. I'm usually the first to spot a conspiracy, but this looks like an innocent clarification to improve the quality of the piece. It was shocking enough to see how adamantly the entire editorial board of the New York Times distanced themselves from the administration on this.

[T]hey are just making bit more explicit what was already implied.

Interesting view. I didn't get that implication at all. When I read it I was quite amazed, and impressed, that the Times had flat out said that. Damn straight, I thought.

Typically any edit to a published piece, no matter how small, will have some kind of annotation indicating it was edited.

Not true for newspapers and never has been. Even in the days when print was predominant stories would get edited between printings as new material came to light.

As earlier commenters have noted the original story was pushed out quickly, and later refined. This is totally normal in all newsrooms, and if you diff boring, non-controversial stories, you'll see the same thing--though perhaps to a lesser degree due to the fact that there's less of a rush to get out, say, a travel piece, compared to one with national import.

Full disclosure: I worked at the NYTimes for two years as a developer in the newsroom. NYT editors and reporters are, almost universally, smart, careful, well-intentioned people.

Reading suggestion: "Flat Earth News" by Nick Davies. Essential to understand how the modern news room really works.

What a phenomenal idea for a site.

Agreed, I hadn't seen it before I saw this entry on HN. Really awesome idea for a site.

I'm reasonably certain that archive.org must be using some differential encoding of pages. Otherwise the archiving process would waste a lot of space. They're just not making it visible.

EDIT: Also: http://www.changedetection.com

I'm so happy that newsdiffs exists! I had come up with the same idea (and name) independently after noticing substantial edits to articles on a major NZ news website, but never got around to creating the tool. I'm excited to check out their github repo and see if I can setup tracking for the sites I'm interested in.

I've toyed with that idea ever since WinerWatcher [1] , even started a repo or two, but nobody in my circle of friends seemed to believe in it, so I dropped it. More or less like it happened with any personal project I've ever started since 1999...

[1] http://brian.carnell.com/articles/2003/mark-pilgrims-winer-w...

That'a a blast from the past. WinerWatcher was awesome, and its subject's reaction to it damnably revealing.

you need some more supportive friends. Hit me up; I love innovative things like this by passionate people. I even like to work on them in my spare time, collaboratively (remotely of course). Contact info is on the profile page.

One reason for this edit may be that Drudge's link to the story reads "NYT: He has lost all credibility..."

This is just below a link reading "Fournier: Obama's Police State..."

[Note, I support everyone highlighting this issue, even Drudge. There's been far too little concern with the fear of terrorism being used to justify the erosion of our civil liberties, first by Republicans under Bush, and now by Democrats under Obama.]

I'm sure the editorial board's original intent was to say that Obama had lost all credibility on this particular topic. They were simply clarifying. Losing all credibility isn't really true in other contexts.

Question: Isn't Newsdiffs setting themselves up for a lawsuit by re-printing the article?

I think that is unlikely:

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/opinion/sunday/article-ch...

Nice find, great article on Newsdiffs, In the Times.

I wish I could take that much credit, but I simply saw the link here: http://www.newsdiffs.org/

The 'Fair Use' case for this is pretty easy and strong:

Transformative use... a form of comment on the original... negligible impact on market for the original... no attempt to profit from the republishing.

They're professional writers, they knew what they wrote and how people would read it.

This is just the plausible deniability phase.

Being a professional writer doesn't mean that your first draft is always perfect. News writers in particular are operating under deadlines; the whole reason that editors exist is to deal with the inevitable flaws that creep into writing.

Sorry, I just don't believe a line like that goes out unknowingly. It's the obvious pull quote from the whole thing, not a minor sentence that no one noticed.

And if I was an editor, I'd dial it back a notch too because it reads more as polemic than principle. Administering the executive branch of the USG is a huge and diverse task; To suggest that the administration had lost all credibility, on any topic, in the light of this news seems laughably overstated to me.

Personally, I'm much more interested in the implications of this for the legislative branch, which has had a pattern of abdicating its responsibility on these issues to the executive for the last decade. (The most obvious example, for context, is the AUMF of 2001 which basically gives the EB a a blank check while eschewing any meaningful oversight role.)

If they're going to edit, they really need to add a comma in this sentence:

"That is one reason we have long argued that the Patriot Act, enacted in the heat of fear after the 9/11 attacks by members of Congress ..."

Also, I don't get why they replaced 'This stunning use of the act' with 'Stunning use of the act'. The new line doesn't make sense, who called for that edit?

I'm guessing because of this front page Fox News article: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/06/06/new-york-times-ed...

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