• morrowind
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    1 year ago

    This is useful for pointing out if a news site is manipulating a narrative, but for other things, I think news site should get the privacy they need to make stealth edits.

    Like:

    More recently, the Times stealth-edited an article that originally listed “death” as one of six ways “you can still cancel your federal student loan debt.” Following the edit, the “death” section title was changed to a more opaque heading of “debt won’t carry on.”

    This was just poor wording. No reason sites shouldn’t have the peace of mind to change poor wording without being called out.

    • wildginger@lemmy.myserv.one
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      1 year ago

      … What? No, if you need to edit poor wording you add a note establishing that the editor missed a section of poor wording, and that section has been revised.

      You want to do stealth edits? We call those first drafts, and they arent published. Want to hide your edit history? Edit before you post.

      • morrowind
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        1 year ago

        People can make mistakes and miss things you know.

        • nooneescapesthelaw
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          1 year ago

          And there is nothing wrong with that, nor is there anything wrong in admitting your mistakes

          • morrowind
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            1 year ago

            Nothing wrong with admitting your mistakes, but also seems to me that you should be able to fix them without publicly announcing it.

            • Crikeste@lemm.ee
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              1 year ago

              Not in the news world. Corrections need to be made so people don’t go around spewing nonsense.

              EDIT: And those corrections need to be bold and assert themselves. You can’t simply change your words and expect people to find the corrections themselves. That is too much work for the reader, and stating corrections is VERY easy for the publisher.

              • Ludwig van Beethoven@sh.itjust.works
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                1 year ago

                This. My national news agency publishes corrections like in ye olden days with ye olde telex: separate issue

                example would be:

                CORRECTION - President denounces war in Israel

                BULLETIN - President denounces war in Isral

                listed separately, added in their own archives etc.

            • GeekFTW@kbin.social
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              1 year ago

              also seems to me that you should be able to fix them without publicly announcing it.

              You would seem to be wrong then lol. News has standards higher than Uncle Joe’s Truckin’ Blog™ or someone’s Aunt’s Facebook post.

            • Beaphe@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              There is no whiteout.

              You will strike thru the error using a single line, leaving the error legible. Then amend the document with the valid information and initial the change as authorized.

              You then submit the new draft, with visible corrections, to be published.

              • MrShankles@reddthat.com
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                1 year ago

                That’s exactly how they taught us in nursing school. If you try and hide the mistake by “scratching” it out, it’s assumed that you’re hiding something. A single strike thru with an initial; owning your mistake. Mistakes are expected, and so is being honest about it. Makes you think twice before writing anything half-assed

                Granted, most of us don’t do paper-charting anymore; but the EMR still tracks any addendum. Don’t go writing bullshit that you’re unable to explain

                • themelm@sh.itjust.works
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                  1 year ago

                  Same with engineering type courses too. And all my science labs. And any contracts job forms etc. I’m constantly trying to get apprentices to break the habit of scratching things out. We dont destroy information. What if you were wrong about being wrong? And write units for things and not just numbers dammit.

        • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 year ago

          You should ad an edit to this comment:
          Like this:

          Edit:

          People can make mistakes and miss things you know.

          This is an example where I am objectively wrong and I apologize.

    • Alien Nathan Edward@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Horseshit. If your editor doesn’t catch the article that says “have the peasants considered suicide as a way out of debt bondage?” then you as a news outlet should absolutely have to live with what you published.

    • xam54321@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      They wouldn’t be called out if they had left editorial notes, that is what the article is about.

    • SomeoneSomewhere@lemmy.nz
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      1 year ago

      But how do you determine what’s just ‘fixing poor wording’ and what’s actively hiding major bias or retcons of history?

      Radio NZ got caught a year or so ago with a staffer who was editing articles syndicated from Reuters to be more pro-Russian. Should they be able to sweep that under the rug and claim it was only ever the one article they got caught on?

      Likewise, bin Laden was originally hailed as an anti-Soviet freedom fighter. The articles relating to that are part of the historical record and kinda important.

      Allowing the historical record to be retconned with impunity was probably the defining trait of 1984. It’s really not a path you want to go down.

      • morrowind
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        1 year ago

        You don’t and there’s no good way to reconcile my two opinions. I don’t disagree the archive should exist, I’m just saying, manipulating information is a valid reason, but the author’s bullying publishers for mistakes isn’t.

        • conciselyverbose@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          Acknowledging literally every change after any news content is published in any context isn’t bullying anyone.

          It’s the absolute bare minimum to not be a piece of shit.

        • theneverfox@pawb.social
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          1 year ago

          There’s an easy way to reconcile them… The opinions are “articles should be backed up to prevent information manipulation, a threat to democracy” and “they should be able to hide their mistakes so they don’t get made fun of”

          You reconcile them by not letting them stealth edit, and you stand up for them when they made an honest mistake and are being blasted for it

    • ryan@the.coolest.zone
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      1 year ago

      While I agree in theory, it’s hard practically to give the ability to make private wording and typo edits without giving the ability to make more insidious changes - like pushing a certain narrative and then quietly changing words here and there to erase evidence of that after most people have read it, etc.

      If news websites kept their own visible audit trail, much like Wikipedia, I could see the argument that Internet Archive doesn’t need to capture these articles immediately, maybe it should be time bound to a year after publication or somesuch, and therefore recent news could retain its paywall by the NYT without being sidestepped by Internet Archive. (While it’s annoying that articles are paywalled, news sites do need to make money and pay for actual news reporters.)

      • morrowind
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        1 year ago

        Yeah I’m surprised the archive hasn’t worked out a deal with publishers simply to delay showing articles.

        • _dev_null@lemmy.zxcvn.xyz
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          1 year ago

          It exists, it’s called a robots.txt file that the developers can put into place, and then bots like the webarchive crawler will ignore the content.

          And therein lies the issue: if you place a robots.txt out for the content, all bots will ignore the content, including search engine indexers.

          So huge publishers want it both ways, they want to be indexed, but they don’t want the content to be archived.

          If the NYT is serious about not wanting to have their content on the webarchive but still want humans to see it, the solution is simple: Put that content behind a login! But the NYT doesn’t want to do that, since then they’ll lose out on the ad revenue of having regular people load their website.

          I think in the case of the article here though, the motivation is a bit more nefarious, in that the NYT et al simply don’t want to be held accountable. So there’s a choice to be had for them, either retain the privilege of being regarded as serious journalism, or act like a bunch of hacks that can’t be relied upon.

    • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      When a news provider publishes something they should be able to be held to what they’ve said. That’s the nature of both publication and the responsibility that the press should be held to

    • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      Editing news should require by law an editors note at the bottom what was changed to what like a github commit.

      If you cite that shit literally somewhere you could get in trouble for citing wrongly.

    • modifier@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      I don’t care how many times you edit your comment, but I also don’t trust you at all. Now, I don’t have to trust you because clearly I am not going to learn anything of value from you.

      If you don’t care whether I trust you or not, this shouldn’t bother you.

      Most Newspapers trade on their credibility. They should want to be trusted that they aren’t making material changes to their articles. Are you suggesting we leave it to them to decide for themselves what constitutes a material change?

      • HughJanus
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        1 year ago

        Most Newspapers trade on their credibility

        BWAAAAAAHAHAHA!

        • tricoro
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          1 year ago

          It’s sad but it’s true. People out there really believe newspapers as if they were sacred texts.

          • modifier@lemmy.ca
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            1 year ago

            So, how much nuance do you think exists between the idea of “credible” and the idea of “sacred texts”?

      • morrowind
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        1 year ago

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