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Excellent point. The whole episode is very instructive. On Sunday the New York Times quoted "law enforcement sources" as saying that she had made postings on

by jdp23 11y ago

Excellent point. The whole episode is very instructive. On Sunday the New York Times quoted "law enforcement sources" as saying that she had made postings on her stream. The story got a huge amount of coverage and even came up during Tuesday's Republican debate. On Wednesday, FBI Director Comey described the reporting as "grabled" and clarified that no, it was just private messages -- and the Times (and others) rewrote their stories to reflect it. But you can't unring a bell; most people's opinion, and even more importantly their emotional responses, are based on the original story. Erik Wemple covers this well in the Washington Post [1] Times' "public editor" Margeret Sullivan's looks at it as well [2], noting that two of the reporters also incorrectly reported that Hillary Clinton was the target of a criminal investigation. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2015/12/16/the-fbi-just-blasted-reporting-on-the-san-bernardino-killings/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2015/12/... [2] http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/12/18/new-york-times-san-bernardino-correction-margaret-sullivan-public-editor/ http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/12/18/new-york-ti...

kbenson 11y ago
I wish we had something that tracked news articles and noted when they changed without either an inline note about the change or an update at the end. It would be like the snopes of news journalism, and we could get some really interesting statistics from that with regard to the journalistic integrity of different sources. There's a large population of people that could do with some good evidence to force them to be more critical of certain news sources.
- niels_olson 11y ago
  It would be like, like a wiki, but before the admins go off the reservation.
  - kbenson 11y ago
    Eh, I think it has to be third-party for exactly that reason. You can never rely on the admins not going off-reservation,or being explicitly ordered to hide changes. If an organization is willing to update a story to change major facts without any indication of such, I see no reason to trust they wouldn't hide change history. Sure, it may be a smaller portion of organizations on a smaller number of articles that are willing to take it to this next level, but it would be better to bypass that entirely and just have an impartial record.
- r721 11y ago
  This exists: http://newsdiffs.org/ http://newsdiffs.org/
  - kbenson 11y ago
    Awesome, thank you!

by jdp23 11y ago

kbenson 11y ago

I wish we had something that tracked news articles and noted when they changed without either an inline note about the change or an update at the end. It would be like the snopes of news journalism, and we could get some really interesting statistics from that with regard to the journalistic integrity of different sources. There's a large population of people that could do with some good evidence to force them to be more critical of certain news sources.

niels_olson 11y ago
It would be like, like a wiki, but before the admins go off the reservation.
- kbenson 11y ago
  Eh, I think it has to be third-party for exactly that reason. You can never rely on the admins not going off-reservation,or being explicitly ordered to hide changes. If an organization is willing to update a story to change major facts without any indication of such, I see no reason to trust they wouldn't hide change history. Sure, it may be a smaller portion of organizations on a smaller number of articles that are willing to take it to this next level, but it would be better to bypass that entirely and just have an impartial record.
r721 11y ago
This exists: http://newsdiffs.org/ http://newsdiffs.org/
- kbenson 11y ago
  Awesome, thank you!