MSNBC.com was caught changing a story about Cheney’s shooting to remove quoted references to alcohol.
Of course we’ll never know if Cheney was drunk since the Secret Service turned away a Local Sheriff who didn’t get the memo and showed up at the ranch to interview the participants. Which sort of begs the question as to why anyone would bother making this change anyway. But I digress…
What I find more interesting is that as we move to consume all our “news” from the network, we have no effective version control for legitimate news organizations. When you print a newspaper, you’re essentially committing the story to source control each time you roll the press. The Wikipedia and RSS folks knew this and designed revision history into the system. We should be demanding similar treatment from our online media sources because the potential for precisely this type of abuse is quite troubling.
FWIW, the email addresses for MSNBC’s senior management can be found here. (Scroll down to “2. Contact MSNBC”.)
Update: the scrubbed paragraph returns. The story changes depending on when you read it…
Update: well this is certainly pretty “murky” now, isn’t it? And yet somehow, I think clarity shines through.
