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> If you forget about interpretations of their policies, how they handled the retraction looks strongly ethical to me. But don't you agree that it would increa

> If you forget about interpretations of their policies, how they handled the retraction looks strongly ethical to me. But don't you agree that it would increase transparency to leave the original text available on the website with a large disclaimer that the story was retracted and NPR no longer endorses the text?

boomboomsubban 9y ago
Maybe, but transparency isn't the only important thing. People can ignore disclaimers, and continue to quote the article out if context. Many people wouldn't check the source, and some that did would skip past the disclaimers and find the quote was accurate.
- jessriedel 9y ago
  We can prevent actual accidents by making sufficiently obvious disclaimers. The fact that some individuals can willfully ignore disclaimers seems like too weak (and too convenient) a reason to expunge stuff completely. Anyone who is willing to quote from a retracted article without mentioning the retraction can always just lie instead.
  - boomboomsubban 9y ago
    People willfully ignoring context is what this entire sub-discussiom is about. Making that more difficult is beneficial, and I haven't seen your case for why more transparency would be beneficial. They've been clear on their actions, and they aren't making efforts to scrub the web clean of the past. What benefit is there to their continued hosting of something they've found to be wrong?
    - jessriedel 9y ago
      If a newspaper makes a mistake, they have an enormous degree of flexibility to paint their reporting in less negative light if they can just summarize what happened. Like, would you be satisfied if they just wrote "This story has been retracted"? Or what about "This story has been retracted because we didn't interview the person maligned"? The best way to ensure that readers can understand all the mistakes that happened, and thereby update their opinion of the newspaper/journalist, is if they can see exactly what was said.
      - boomboomsubban 9y ago
        >If a newspaper makes a mistake, they have an enormous degree of flexibility to paint their reporting in less negative light if they can just summarize what happened But they can't do that, after the newspaper is printed you can find a copy of it with the original story, likely at the library. Similarly, copies of this story are still available online, just not on the NPR page. The equivalence of your suggestion in a newspaper would be their printing the entire story again in the next edition with a retraction, and I assume you could see how that could cause confusion.
        jessriedel 9y ago
        > But they can't do that, after the newspaper is printed you can find a copy of it with the original story, likely at the library. This only prevents them from giving outright false summaries. It does not prevent them from casting things in a more favorable light. Only a tiny subset of readers will use the library or archive.org, and they won't be able to say NPR lied. > The equivalence of your suggestion in a newspaper would be their printing the entire story again in the next edition with a retraction This would only be fully equivalent if the pre-digital newspaper printed every story in their archives every day. The closest analogy that exists is [new content]=[today's print paper] and [online archives]=[previous print newspapers] That said, the online archives don't have a perfect analog in the pre-digital world. But importantly, they are simply not meant to represent a collection of only true statements. They are rather a record of what was said when. Note, for instance, that newspapers do not expunge from their online archives all stories that end up having false statements or implications through no fault of the newspaper (e.g., government officials lied or criminal convictions were overturned). Retraction is about admitting journalistic fault for the record. Now, we can separately make arguments that individuals should be able to have false negative information about themselves removed from (easy) public access, a la the right to be forgotten. (In the current case, this could be accomplished by simply censoring the name of the subject of the article while preserving the rest of the text.) But this is a completely separate justification (which unavoidably pits the rights of the individual to not be defamed against the rights of the public to be informed) from the argument that all retracted stories (even those that defame no one) should be expunged from the online archives.
jmull 9y ago
I agree it would increase transparency, but at the cost of further damage caused by the bad story. E.g., https://techcrunch.com/2013/01/24/study-finds-that-we-still-believe-untruths-even-after-instant-online-corrections/ https://techcrunch.com/2013/01/24/study-finds-that-we-still-... Damage has already been done, since it appears that retractions have limited effect, if any. But removing the bad story at least means new people won’t stumble across it and be misled. It’s a balance and personally, I think they made the right choice. If it were me, I’d feel better if there was an indirect and obscure way to retrieve the original story. Perhaps in this case there’s an archive that severs the purpose? If so, great. Of course it would be much better if no mistake had been made, but sooner or later mistakes are always made. You only find out the character of a person or organization by how often mistakes are made and what the reaction is.
- jessriedel 9y ago
  Then prevent them from easily stumbling across it, but don't prevent them from accessing it in any form.
  - fourthark 9y ago
    It's interesting how this relates to the "right to be forgotten." Some interpret that to mean that the content will still exist, but will not be indexed by search engines. If so, then we are evolving into two Nets, the searchable one and the - what? - one you have to follow links into? Links with grave warnings on them? I'm not sure this is entirely bad but it's weird. Will we also have pirate offshore search engines that ignore robots.txt and refuse to deindex? Also see: the internet archive of things they aren't allowed to show because of robots.txt
    - jessriedel 9y ago
      I agree that these issues are closely related, and one people's opinions on them will be correlated. However, much of the time we can find solutions that will almost everyone happy, e.g., removing just the name of individuals from retracted stories (an idea suggested by someone else in this thread). Importantly, almost no one thinks the mistakes of the newspapers have a right to be forgotten, or more precisely, that newspapers have an defensible interest in erasing the details of their errors and leaving only a summary (written by themselves!) describing the error and declaring a retraction.

boomboomsubban 9y ago

Maybe, but transparency isn't the only important thing. People can ignore disclaimers, and continue to quote the article out if context. Many people wouldn't check the source, and some that did would skip past the disclaimers and find the quote was accurate.

jessriedel 9y ago
We can prevent actual accidents by making sufficiently obvious disclaimers. The fact that some individuals can willfully ignore disclaimers seems like too weak (and too convenient) a reason to expunge stuff completely. Anyone who is willing to quote from a retracted article without mentioning the retraction can always just lie instead.
- boomboomsubban 9y ago
  People willfully ignoring context is what this entire sub-discussiom is about. Making that more difficult is beneficial, and I haven't seen your case for why more transparency would be beneficial. They've been clear on their actions, and they aren't making efforts to scrub the web clean of the past. What benefit is there to their continued hosting of something they've found to be wrong?
  - jessriedel 9y ago
    If a newspaper makes a mistake, they have an enormous degree of flexibility to paint their reporting in less negative light if they can just summarize what happened. Like, would you be satisfied if they just wrote "This story has been retracted"? Or what about "This story has been retracted because we didn't interview the person maligned"? The best way to ensure that readers can understand all the mistakes that happened, and thereby update their opinion of the newspaper/journalist, is if they can see exactly what was said.
    - boomboomsubban 9y ago
      >If a newspaper makes a mistake, they have an enormous degree of flexibility to paint their reporting in less negative light if they can just summarize what happened But they can't do that, after the newspaper is printed you can find a copy of it with the original story, likely at the library. Similarly, copies of this story are still available online, just not on the NPR page. The equivalence of your suggestion in a newspaper would be their printing the entire story again in the next edition with a retraction, and I assume you could see how that could cause confusion.
      - jessriedel 9y ago
        > But they can't do that, after the newspaper is printed you can find a copy of it with the original story, likely at the library. This only prevents them from giving outright false summaries. It does not prevent them from casting things in a more favorable light. Only a tiny subset of readers will use the library or archive.org, and they won't be able to say NPR lied. > The equivalence of your suggestion in a newspaper would be their printing the entire story again in the next edition with a retraction This would only be fully equivalent if the pre-digital newspaper printed every story in their archives every day. The closest analogy that exists is [new content]=[today's print paper] and [online archives]=[previous print newspapers] That said, the online archives don't have a perfect analog in the pre-digital world. But importantly, they are simply not meant to represent a collection of only true statements. They are rather a record of what was said when. Note, for instance, that newspapers do not expunge from their online archives all stories that end up having false statements or implications through no fault of the newspaper (e.g., government officials lied or criminal convictions were overturned). Retraction is about admitting journalistic fault for the record. Now, we can separately make arguments that individuals should be able to have false negative information about themselves removed from (easy) public access, a la the right to be forgotten. (In the current case, this could be accomplished by simply censoring the name of the subject of the article while preserving the rest of the text.) But this is a completely separate justification (which unavoidably pits the rights of the individual to not be defamed against the rights of the public to be informed) from the argument that all retracted stories (even those that defame no one) should be expunged from the online archives.

jmull 9y ago

I agree it would increase transparency, but at the cost of further damage caused by the bad story. E.g., https://techcrunch.com/2013/01/24/study-finds-that-we-still-believe-untruths-even-after-instant-online-corrections/ https://techcrunch.com/2013/01/24/study-finds-that-we-still-... Damage has already been done, since it appears that retractions have limited effect, if any. But removing the bad story at least means new people won’t stumble across it and be misled. It’s a balance and personally, I think they made the right choice. If it were me, I’d feel better if there was an indirect and obscure way to retrieve the original story. Perhaps in this case there’s an archive that severs the purpose? If so, great. Of course it would be much better if no mistake had been made, but sooner or later mistakes are always made. You only find out the character of a person or organization by how often mistakes are made and what the reaction is.

jessriedel 9y ago
Then prevent them from easily stumbling across it, but don't prevent them from accessing it in any form.
- fourthark 9y ago
  It's interesting how this relates to the "right to be forgotten." Some interpret that to mean that the content will still exist, but will not be indexed by search engines. If so, then we are evolving into two Nets, the searchable one and the - what? - one you have to follow links into? Links with grave warnings on them? I'm not sure this is entirely bad but it's weird. Will we also have pirate offshore search engines that ignore robots.txt and refuse to deindex? Also see: the internet archive of things they aren't allowed to show because of robots.txt
  - jessriedel 9y ago
    I agree that these issues are closely related, and one people's opinions on them will be correlated. However, much of the time we can find solutions that will almost everyone happy, e.g., removing just the name of individuals from retracted stories (an idea suggested by someone else in this thread). Importantly, almost no one thinks the mistakes of the newspapers have a right to be forgotten, or more precisely, that newspapers have an defensible interest in erasing the details of their errors and leaving only a summary (written by themselves!) describing the error and declaring a retraction.