A newspaper vanished from the internet. Did someone pay to kill it?(washingtonpost.com) |
A newspaper vanished from the internet. Did someone pay to kill it?(washingtonpost.com) |
If you make it illegal to archive the news, the news don't get archived.
1993 NYTimes article about it: https://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/24/us/anti-defamation-league...
2018: 1000+ words about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anti-Defamation_L...
2019: about 400 words. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anti-Defamation_L...
2020: less than 100 words. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anti-Defamation_L...
Present: less than 100 words, and no longer given it's own subtitled section but buried in the middle of a summary of a decade (not mentioned in the 'Controversies' section): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Defamation_League#1990s
That could be due to changes to Google's search algorithm, which has made it harder to find anything, especially older content.
Add to that the fact that all the court cases resulting from enforcement actions are public and... I don't understand your point at all. This is very well documented and understood from the perspective of a historian.
I think you're confusing "very hard to find details" with "People Don't Agree With Me That This is Important". I mean, it's a technical and boring financial scandal which was mostly victimless at the level of individuals (the "victims" got big mortgages they otherwise couldn't qualify for!). It's just not surprising that this fades from public memory. But that's on all of us, not the recordkeeping.
I repeat, it's hard to find detailed information about a major historical event.
> I think you're confusing "very hard to find details" with "People Don't Agree With Me That This is Important".
Nothingburger, I guess.
> t's a technical and boring financial scandal which was mostly victimless at the level of individuals
Absolutely bonkers statement. Every robosigned document represented an individual whose house was in danger.
> It's just not surprising that this fades from public memory.
It is surprising that the hundreds of articles written about it at the time are gone, and we're getting history from law firm ads. Why is information available on the sites of law firms? Because this was a widespread fraud that affected individuals, and they needed lawyers.
> But that's on all of us, not the recordkeeping.
What?
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Edit: I'm talking about people working to get information removed from the internet, and you're talking about memory. Very few people remember this one woman being raped, so is it "on all of us" that the accused pulled a newspaper off the internet?
Additionally, the robosigning scandal disappearing is just an egregious example that I assumed everyone would be familiar with. There are any number of smaller profile financial scandals involving billions of dollars and huge institutions where the participants are still active in industry and public life. They're often completely obliterated from the web, and you can only find reference to the fallout on ancient sites that have been left on the internet due to neglect, filled with dead links that need to be fished from archive.org.
Information can be unpublished. I'm not convinced it cannot be entirely deleted given sufficient legal pressure.
Sadly - but predictably - the Washington Post story ends with "whoever did this horrible thing had a good lawyer, and covered their tracks well". Zero hint that anything could actually be done to guard against more such bad things happening. Let alone that anyone should get off their "click headline, read story, get angry, repeat" butt and try to do something.
Pro Tip: If you're selling / downsizing / closing a web site that's full of important information (for history, public interest, etc.), then you should consider donating it to a library with the resources to keep it on-line. Or at least keeping a copy, and put in a clause into the sale contract about free & easy public access having to continue. Or any public library being allowed to also host it, free, if they chose to do so.
If you want to get off your butt I’m sure you could probably contribute to the investigation yourself. It seems very amenable to volunteer “OSINT” type of research from dedicated volunteers.
Once it is established that the takedown was either completely legal, or very easily could have been - then my attitude is that spending further resources on a "takedown whodunnit" investigation is about like tracking an escaped horse from the open barn door to the highway, where it was hit and killed by a truck. Beyond a little story to tell, you probably won't have much to show for the effort.
My notion of "doing something" is more about closing the damned barn door, before more horses get out. The Washington Post would need ~zero reporter resources to clearly make that point. Maybe throw in a kudo to some lawmaker who's trying to help on that front, or some old-newspaper-story preservation effort.
Please criticize the work, not the incentives[1]. In this case it seems like a pretty darn good piece of public interest journalism. Do you disagree?
[1] Example: Elon Musk banning journalists out of personal pique is a terrible thing, not because "Billionaires shouldn't own Twitter" (even though many people believe that to be true) but because censorship, especially censorship of inconvenient journalism, is evil.
Yeah, so why not one the biggest conflicts of interest there is?
Enough with this tiresome criticism, why not embrace acceptance of the status quo - perhaps with minor complaints here and there?
>Please criticize the work, not the incentives.
The incentives influence the work, including the absense of coverage in certain areas, the softening of some, the framing on others, in self-censorship and "knowing their limits" on the side of the journalists themselves, and all kinds of fuzzy ways that one can't pinpoint on this or that article, but are absolutely there nonetheless.
In any case, media power in hands of unprecendented private business power, is not a good thing, even if the influence is only activated once in a blue moon when it really matters - and even if it's never overt. It's that simple.
"Someone has to own these companies and pay the journalists"? Not really: I'd rather a newsparer is not operating, than owned and paid by the richest man on Earth.
>In this case it seems like a pretty darn good piece of public interest journalism. Do you disagree?
"In this case" it could be, but that's irrelevant. I wrote about the irony of WP covering an "undue rich person's influence on media" story, not whether that particular story is false. Hypocrisy is hypocrisy even if the other person really did the thing you accuse them of.
In fact, one would expect real misdeeds by the owner's rivals to be accurately reported, and bogus stories on non-existing misdeeds by the owner's rivals. What I don't expect is stories on the owner's own (and his friends) misdeeds to be accurately reported, or bogus stories on owner non-misdeeds.
I also disagree with your categorization of owned vs propaganda. People on HN generally respect NPR as well as many "owned" outlets. WaPo is just notable because Jeff has a history of developing a master plan years in advance where all his components are critical and subtle.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/05/02/the-historian-whitewash...
Specifically: if this buyer is attempting to "catch and kill" stories by purchasing and destroying the archive, then a good fix is to ensure that there is new reporting that undermines the purchaser's goal and actually drives more attention to their activities. Indeed, far from being something to complain about, this Washington Post story seems like the first step in achieving exactly that goal. It now needs to be followed up by further investigation that identifies the specific individual(s) at issue so they can be explicitly named and shamed.
Your alternative approach is what exactly? Clearly you're correct that posting the archives to a public library would have been better. But I'm not sure how to force for-profit publishers to do this in the past (impossible) or even in the future.
I don't think what's happening on that article is organic history compaction. For one, the controversy is about 30 years old but has been 'compacted' by an order of magnitude in about 4 years. I would expect organic history compaction to fairly linear and continuous (as the passage of time is.) Secondly, the controversies section on that article still has several paragraphs about less substantial stuff which happened almost 50 years ago.
OP called it rich. It's a fair criticism - because it is rich even if true. These things are not mutually exclusive.
My point was, you're asking OP to be silent. You can also just ignore this kind of point, because looking at things from this perspective may not be in your interest. It's not particularly mine either, but I still think it's good not everyone likes my kind of ice cream.
Is it? It appears to be "Oh, sure, it's okay when Jeff Bezos does it, but not when this guy does it," but what are the two "its" in question here? On the one hand, a mysterious, anonymous purchaser buying a small newspaper's archive in order to completely suppress it; on the other, a major newspaper was sold in the open by one rich family to another in part to ensure the paper's continued publication. I'm as up for criticizing the disproportionate influence of billionaires on the public sphere as much as anyone, but these two things are manifestly not like one another.
No, to be clear: I'm saying you guys are wrong, that you're arguing from bad logic, and that taking your point on its face would require ignoring good and important pieces of public interest journalism like the linked article.
I certainly don't deny that the business structure of newspapers sometimes leads to conflicts of interest[1]. I just don't see that whining about it in the abstract does anything but drive people away from journalism they need to read.
To repeat: you (you, personally) should read this article, and the rest of the WaPo, even if Bezos paid for it. Because if you don't all you're doing is wrapping yourself in an information bubble.
[1] Though I don't for a second believe Bezos is any worse than "News Corp" or "China", or for that matter "Russia" or even "VoA" as an interfering owner.
Now, let's start:
> I'm saying you guys are wrong,
I read the article before I replied to you. I don't think OP said "don't read the article". They called it "rich criticism" coming from WaPo. That says nothing of the author. Literally no one you responded to has said don't read the article.
> [1] Though I don't for a second believe Bezos is any worse than "News Corp" or "China", or for that matter "Russia" or even "VoA" as an interfering owner.
All of the above are ass, but we're stuck with them. Personally, I read WaPo, NPR, WSJ, and the like. The only ones I actively avoid are Fox, NYT, NBC, and CNN.
Anyway, I'm going to stop replying now. Point is, no one said don't read it. It's okay to read it and chuckle at the facts around WaPo simultaneously. Nothing is diluted there.
Have a nice day!
Now that part I agree with! Now... why doesn't the same logic apply to Bezos?
To AJ's point, it also says nothing of the article, which is I think the point he's working towards. If your comment speaks neither to the author nor the article, then unless there is a reason to point out a conflict of interests, then it becomes a low-to-middle brow dismissal of the article in question without referencing it.
There are of course cases in which it is important to make conflicts visible. "Bezos Owned Paper Investigates Bezos Owned Book Company, Finds Everything Perfect" is too perhaps too obviously a conflict of interest, but merely pointing out the association everyone already knows is of low value without a reason to point it out, and I see none here.
Yes, there is cause to worry about Bezos putting his finger on the scales of reporting. That said it is virtually impossible for him to be involved with every article published in every section of their paper. So, TLDR, it's probably worth it to save allegations of bias for when they bear on the discussion.