This is indeed common practice in journalism (but not science) when retracting a story, but it's not synonymous with "retraction". Indeed, daily newspapers bef

This is indeed common practice in journalism (but not science) when retracting a story, but it's not synonymous with "retraction". Indeed, daily newspapers before the internet often "retracted" stories when they clearly couldn't change how many copies were available. This is why the term "unpublish" has been introduced in the age of the internet.