Nope. It sure was responding to "third parties asking to remove embarrassing information", but the policy that NPR pointed to (and that I quoted) is more general than that. See what I quoted above.
It's pretty dubious to take that quote completely out of context and apply it to a different context.
Why should we accept your claim that the policy "is more general than that"? Just pointing back to the out-of-context quote does literally nothing to back that claim up.
I'll just note, what they did passes the sniff test... if you forget about interpretations of their policies, how they handled the retraction looks strongly ethical to me.
It seems likely you're simply misunderstanding their policies, doesn't it?
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would increase transparency to leave the original text available on the website with a large disclaimer that the story was retracted and NPR no longer endorses the text?
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.
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.
This is the state of things, huge errors in headline stories are retracted in the following issue with merely a line saying they were wrong. There have been examples of people getting an innocent verdict incorrectly labeled guilty in the story. If transparency is your goal, the story calling them guilty should be reprinted with corrections noted. That would be more transparent, but would not be beneficial to anyone.
>that all retracted stories (even those that defame no one) should be expunged from the online archives.
Again, I do not wish the story expunged from online archives, and it does not appear NPR is doing anything like this. Removing it from their personal archive is a different matter. Leaving it up provides more transparency, but provides no benefit. The error made is clear enough in the retraction, suspicious parties can still see their full error should they want to, and their erroneous story is not causing additional issues by being spread.
This system can absolutely be abused, but as the archive exists it would be easy to tell when it was. Your proposed change allows for a different kind of abuse, also easy to detect, and opens the door for confusion to cause issues. Hell, the only positive you can name is it allows people to easily judge mistakes. Mistakes are inevitable, they need to be judged for their malicious actions, which is still possible in this system.
I agree, this is the state of things for most newspapers (which I'm criticizing), but not, for example, for science journals.
> If transparency is your goal, the story calling them guilty should be reprinted with corrections noted.
Again, that would be sensible only if the entire archives were reprinted each day. There are economic limitations for print newspapers that make this infeasible. But if it were the case that print newspapers could feasibly re-printed their entire archives each day, then yes, I endorse them leaving the disclaimed erroneous story in those archives, to be re-printed each day.
That's not the same thing as re-printing the disclaimed erroneous story on the front page.
> >that all retracted stories (even those that defame no one) should be expunged from the online archives.
> Again, I do not wish the story expunged from online archives, and it does not appear NPR is doing anything like this. Removing it from their personal archive is a different matter.
Sorry I wasn't clear. When I write "online archives", I mean NPR's online archives. I am not talking about archive.org or similar.
> suspicious parties can still see their full error should they want to
I would agree that this was the case if the majority of internet users knew what archive.org is. In fact, I bet that less (probably much less) than 5% do. Thus they are effectively hiding the erroneous story from almost the entire readership.
E.g., 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.
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
https://www.npr.org/sections/ombudsman/2018/04/12/601650762/...
it's one of the most basic things in our profession, that we gather responses from the people who are the subject of criticism
the reporter... did not seek comment from the individual identified in the story
NPR learned of the mistake via an email from someone who said he was representing the person NPR had identified as the "author."
At this point you might expect a correction with the new information from the third party added to the original story, but that won't work here.
In order to fix the problems, we would have essentially had to construct a different story," a process that he said would have been "intellectually dishonest. There comes a point that you can't fix a story appropriately
By analogy, sometimes the best thing to do is roll back code instead of trying to fix it.
Furthermore, the best policy would be to retain a complete edit history of the story online, which is obviously possible even if the entire story is retracted. Given that the edit history would include a clear statement that NPR no longer endorses the claims made there, I can't see a reason for not making the edit history public other than reducing embarrassment of NPR.
That said, NPR is far from the only major news organization that declines to keep the edit history public.
The point is very simple: removal != retraction. Removing without retraction is erasing history. Issuing a retraction is not erasing history.
And obviously, in this context, "erasing history" means the thing it means in standard vernacular English. Not the thing it means in git terminology.
> Furthermore, the best policy would be to retain a complete edit history of the story online... I can't see a reason for not making the edit history public other than reducing embarrassment of NPR.
1. How does showing the edit history reduce embarrassment to NPR?
(e: Ironically, if reducing embarrassment were their goal, they would've found a way to keep the story as in-tact as possible. "Look, we weren't 100% wrong. We just had to change a few paragraphs". IMO a full retraction is far more embarrassing than trying to weasel out of it by keeping as much of the story in-tact as possible.)
2. Some real downsides to this approach are already debated down-thread.
I'm a native speaker of English and I'm not sure what that means.
Exactly. NPR should retract the story -- that is, admit mistake and add a clear statement that they do not endorse it -- but they should not remove the text from the internet. The policy ColanR quotes says content should not be removed, and everyone agrees that content can be retracted.
> Removing without retraction is erasing history. Issuing a retraction is not erasing history.
But issuing a retraction and and removing the text is (an attempt to) erase history in standard vernacular English, i.e. make it difficult for others to figure out what happened in the past by hiding evidence. It's true that silently removing the story is even worse, because it erases the history of the article's existence rather than just erasing the history of the article's content.
> 1. How does showing the edit history reduce embarrassment to NPR?
You misunderstand my claim. Showing the edit history would increase embarrassment for NPR.
> Ironically, if reducing embarrassment were their goal, they would've found a way to keep the story as in-tact as possible.
This is not true if the error was so egregious that it couldn't be defended with a straight face. Given the constraint that the story must be retracted (i.e., un-endorsed), it is clearly more embarrassing for them to leave the retracted text online than to remove it from the website.
> IMO a full retraction is far more embarrassing than trying to weasel out of it by keeping as much of the story in-tact as possible
You misunderstand. None of us think they should weaseling out of it. I am comparing what they have done to the better procedure of (1) retracting the story (in the sense of declaring that it is flawed and not defensible) but (2) leaving the text of the story publicly available with a disclaimer.
> 2. Some real downsides to this approach are already debated down-thread
This thread has dozens and dozens of comments, many of which are flawed, and I'm not sure what you're referring to.
The best thing for both parties is to remove the original text and post a retraction notice explaining what used to be there and why it’s now gone.
I think the salient point is that there's a huge difference between a silent removal and a public retraction. The practices that NPR indicts in your original post obviously refer to the latter. Removing without retraction is certainly an attempt to "erase history". Publishing a public retraction and discussing it at length is not "erasing history".
NPR's executives have even explained why, in this particular case, they chose to remove the article: Turpin said, "In order to fix the problems, we would have essentially had to construct a different story," a process that he said would have been "intellectually dishonest. There comes a point that you can't fix a story appropriately." He said the decision was not made lightly; "we believe strongly we don't want to disappear material for any reason if we can possibly keep from taking it down."
edit: Essentially it's the difference between a ghost edit and an "edit: I changed xyz in my post". Do you really believe that silently /dev/null'ing an article is equivalent to a public retraction?