4 ms·
Why not?
by danso 9y ago
Why not?
- mieseratte 9y agoKnowledge is power! By presenting us the full-picture, we can potentially guard ourselves in the future.
- danso 9y agoBut NPR is asserting that its story was fundamentally flawed. Leaving it as is, even with a massive correction note, implies that the story has some worth, when in actuality it may be completely misleading because of the lack of reporting.
- dingo_bat 9y agoIt does have worth. It is a warning to them to not publish stuff not fully vetted. Removing the article makes everything else vapor. It diminishes the worth of everything they publish.
- danso 9y agoYou believe that the lesson is forgotten, even though the content of the retracted article is now several paragraphs describing the errors that led to the retraction? How exactly is that not a warning to journalists in the future?
- dingo_bat 9y agoHow do I know what the mistake was? I did not read the original article. There is no proper way for me to understand the issue. Yeah I can go look up archives people took before they purged the article, but that is besides the point. NPR has hidden their mistake. They have made it impossible for a reader to fully understand the blunder they committed. It doesn't help anyone. It certainly doesn't inspire trust in their journalistic capability.
- mieseratte 9y agoWhy bother publishing first-hand sources of history? Because new meaning or insight can possibly be gleaned from them.
- syrrim 9y agoNo doubt many people read the original story. Those people will carry on believing the original story unless they are corrected.
- detaro 9y agoHow does the story being available or not change that?
- sgtmas2006 9y agoBeing available with a correction allows anyone who has seen it that shares it to another person, so long as the person told cares about authenticity, to go online and find out that in reality XYZ were incorrect about the story. Removing it from history either allows the prior person to spread misinformation to those that will not research it, preventing them from correcting the person telling the story or learning the truth on their own.
- TwoBit 9y agoIf they don't remove it then redditors will link to it and confuse readers for years to come. At least they should put a banner at the top saying it's retracted.
- dingo_bat 9y agoBecause there is something called professional and human integrity. Own up to your mistakes. Accept responsibility. Do you force push a fix whenever you merge a buggy commit? I would hope not. I describe my mistake, and what I am doing to fix it. But what is done is done. Hiding it is just being unfaithful to your profession and in this case, to your audience.
- danso 9y agoThe very first paragraph of the retraction notice: > 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.