Techdirt. Stories filed under "corrections"

It's Not About Whether Amateur Internet Journalism Is Good Or Bad, But That It Happens And Will Continue To Happen

Mike Masnick — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 16:30:00 PDT

There's been a lot of hand-wringing among the types of people who hand-wring about these things, that there was a flurry of activity on Reddit and Twitter late last night / early this morning believing that one of the suspects in the Boston Bombings was Sunil Tripathi, a Brown student who went missing last month (and, for what it's worth, when people thought it was him, folks from 4Chan started complaining that they had done the real sleuthing, and were pissed off that Reddit got the credit -- but, now that it turned out to be wrong, 4Chan seems happy to let Reddit take the heat). Alexis Madrigal has the basics of the story, which has allowed the usual crew of folks who hate the concept of "citizen journalism" or whatever it's called today to whine about how awful "Reddit" journalism is. Defender of legacy newspapers, Ryan Chittum, seemed particularly gleeful in calling out that Reddit "fails again," and saying that the mainstream media did it right.

Except, that's ridiculous. Mathew Ingram points out that people attacking Reddit for this are missing the point, which is true by a wide, wide margin. First of all, as he notes, mainstream news folks also got parts of the story wrong. As we noted yesterday, the mainstream TV folks got a hell of a lot wrong. Hell, the NY Post even put the wrong two guys on the cover and falsely claimed that the feds were seeking them.

But the bigger problem is this idea that it's "Reddit" or, as some people have argued) "the internet" against the legacy media. That's not true at all. Everyone made mistakes during the rapidly changing story, but only on Reddit did you actually see the details of the process. The legacy news organizations present things as if coming from a place of authority, while Reddit is like an open newsroom where anyone can jump in. The conversation about Tripathi, for example, was about whether or not Suspect #2 was him -- it wasn't based on a declaration that it absolutely was him. Furthermore, when you look at the reason why the story actually spread, it was after some more known "press" names retweeted the initial tweet from Greg Hughes, which claimed (incorrectly) that Tripathi's name went out on the police scanner (ironically, he posted that about a minute after posting "This is the Internet's test of 'be right, not first' with the reporting of this story").

But here's the real issue: people can fret about all of this, but it doesn't change one thing: this is going to happen and continue to happen. People are naturally curious and they're going to talk to people when there's a news story going on and they'll try to figure things out. That happens all the time in newsrooms already before stuff goes on the air or is officially published. It's just that the public doesn't see the process. On Reddit, or anywhere else that the public can converse, it does happen in public. The problem is to assume the two things are the same. Furthermore, it's even more insane to blame "Reddit" or "the internet" as if those are singular entities that anyone has control over. They're not. As Karl Bode noted, they're just massive crowds of people.

An even better point was made by Charles Luzar, who noted that "the crowd doesn't implicitly profess its empirical correctness like the media does," but rather admits quite openly that it's a process in action. Further, he notes that even if the crowd presents false information before finding factual information, that's still "effective crowdsourcing" and, if anything, provides a greater role to the media to be effective curators of the actual facts.

In the end, it seems likely that this incident will actually help a lot the next time there's a big breaking news story, because (hopefully) it will give people more reason to be at least somewhat skeptical of stories coming out, but it's not going to change the fact that groups on various platforms are going to talk about things, and often try to do a little sleuthing themselves. Sometimes they'll get it right, and sometimes they won't -- just the same as many others. It seems like a much better focus looking forward is in providing more training and tools to help the world be better at it.

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Teri Buhl Responds To Our Story; Still Confused About The Internet And The Law

Mike Masnick — Tue, 5 Feb 2013 15:44:16 PST

Yesterday, Tim Cushing wrote a post about Teri Buhl, a journalist who claimed via her Twitter profile that her tweets were "not publishable." When questioned on this, she threatened to sue if someone republished her tweets. Some knowledgeable lawyers gave their opinion on this (that it was all hogwash), and at least one had a short email exchange with Buhl. Hilarity ensued. You can read that whole thing for yourself.

This is the followup. A little over an hour after the post went live, we received an email from Teri Buhl demanding a "correction" (without explanation) and saying that we needed to call her about Tim's story:

I would like an editor to please call about the story Tim just wrote on me. Like now

We have no obligation to call her, and given her previous engagements with others, we felt that there was no reason to discuss this with her. She later posted a comment on the post itself, asking Tim to contact her. He did, and she sent over a statement, and a series of other emails, partly (declared by her) "on the record" and partly "off the record." To be 100% clear: we have zero obligation to not publish her "off the record" comments. We made no arrangements with her to honor her requests that certain comments be "off the record."

Buhl appears to be under the false impression that merely claiming something is "off the record" leads to an obligation that she not be quoted, and that it provides her some sort of legal status, even when others quote her. This applies both to the original story about her tweets and to her follow up emails. Separately, she asked Tim to provide my phone number, and she called our corporate line multiple times this morning, telling him that she "always" calls a subject for comment before publishing a story about them. That may be her decision as a reporter, but there is no such requirement. That's not how freedom of the press or freedom of expression works. Finally, Jim Romenesko picked up on our story in his "Morning Report" on his super popular media blog, leading Teri to send Jim the same basic statement she sent us ("on the record") along with a separate statement suggesting that we had some sort of obligation to contact her before running our story. Let's deal with that one first, and then we'll get into her other claims.

"Techdirt did not call me for comment about that story you followed this am [in the Morning Report]," writes Teri Buhl....

"I finally reached the reporter early this am who says he is working at his day job and can't update the story until he gets home. Then he won't give me the info to directly reach a techdirt editor."

Again, to be clear: we have no obligation to contact her before writing a story about information that was made public. For her to imply that we needed to do so is simply incorrect. Tim correctly noted to her that he was not at his computer, but that he had forwarded her emails to me. He did not, as she implies, promise to update the story. He also did send her to the contact page at Techdirt, which is the best way to reach those of us here.

Moving on to the statement. We will break this down, sentence by sentence, leaving typos and grammatical oddities in place.

On Record Comment:

Again, we made no agreement to keep certain comments on or off the record. Yes, it is a journalistic convention that journalists respect such requests when the people are sources, but it is standard that both sides first agree to that convention. It is not a unilateral thing that you can just declare. When talking to sources we generally offer to keep certain comments off the record. Sometimes sources approach us and ask us to keep certain comments off the record, and we then consider the situation and decide whether or not to accept. It is then that the source chooses whether or not to share.

In this case, none of that is happening. First off, Teri Buhl is not a "source." She is the subject of the story, and we wrote about her comments and discussions with others that made their way into the public record. We have no obligation to keep anything "off the record" nor did we ever agree to any such thing.

My tweets were protected for a long time because I always looked at twitter as a conversation with my readers, not quotes, I'm not reporting news there. I can say silly things some times and I'd like to apologized for my knee jerk reaction to Gideon.

Protecting your tweets is a good idea if you want to keep them mostly quiet, but that is no guarantee that others won't share them. It is quite common for people to retweet the "protected" tweets of others, often not realizing that the original person had protected their tweets. That said, Buhl here implies that her tweets have been protected "for a long time," implying that Gideon only saw her tweet as a follower of hers, and that you could make the argument that the tweets were not, in fact, "public." I would have been willing to concede that perhaps her tweets were for followers only... except that there's evidence that this is simply not true at all. If you look at Buhl's Muck Rack page it does not currently show her tweets. Muck Rack is a site for journalists that creates profiles for those journalists and often pulls together their social media presence. Yet, a simple Google cache search for the feed turns up that, as of at least January 23rd, Buhl's tweets were clearly public on MuckRack. Here's a screenshot: Could it be that Muck Rack has a way to display protected tweets? No. The site directly states that it can only accept public Twitter feeds. And, even if Muck Rack was magically reposting her tweets from a "protected" feed, it would still be a case that her tweets were still being made public, thus depriving her of any claim that the tweets were ever private. In other words, despite her suggestion that her Twitter stream was protected for "a long time," there is substantial evidence that this is not true. If she would like to present evidence to the contrary, we are open to reviewing it. Update: Buhl told Poynter's Jeff Sonderman that she had unprotected her account "a few months ago," directly contradicting her suggestion to us that her tweets were protected during this whole thing.

Of course I can't sue him/her because I don't even know the person's real name.

This has nothing to do with whether or not you can sue someone. Has she honestly never heard of a John Doe lawsuit?

Not publishing my tweets is about a copyright issue for me.

For Teri Buhl, perhaps, but not for copyright law for the most part. We've actually covered some of the issues about the ability to copyright tweets in the past. There may be some elements that are copyrightable, and many that are not. Even so, whether or not someone then quotes you from your tweets is not likely to be "a copyright issue." If, as is the case, we were quoting statements made by her (and repeated by others), and adding plenty of additional commentary to it, there is no copyright issue at all. We are quoting her, not "publishing" her work. Furthermore, even if she went so far as to claim copyright over it, the fair use claims are obvious and quite strong.

I make money off my words, research, and analysis as a journalist.

That may be true, but it has no bearing on anything here.

I never print someone's tweet in a story because 1) I didn't get that comment from them directly

That is her choice, but it has no bearing on whether or not someone else can do so.

2) tweets can be changed and manipulated.

Original tweets can be deleted, but not changed. So, that's wrong. Could a third party change someone else's tweet in the process of retweeting and/or taking a screenshot? Possibly, though that would be quite a bit of effort, and no one seems to suggest that happened here. Buhl's issue here seems to be that she would not quote a tweet, and therefore, when she declares her tweets not quotable, everyone needs to respect that. That is not how things work.

I 've never had another jurno ignore that request. I think it's ironic that lawyer choose to do it.

It is surprising that she's never seen journalists ignore requests to keep her tweets private, though perhaps it's because there's never been any reason to quote her prior to this. And, of course, it's not true. A quick search on Twitter finds people retweeting Buhl's tweets publicly prior to all of this happening. Either way, as stated above, there is no obligation not to quote her just because she says so. Also, it is not, at all, "ironic" that a lawyer chose to do so. He did so because he understands the law and knows that the original claim is bogus.

Twitter says I own my tweets and I'm giving them license to use them but I simply don't think that means I am giving others license. Of course it also depends on what the tweet is to proven I own the copyright.

This is true, but if you are quoting someone and relying on fair use, then we do not need a "license" from either Buhl or Twitter. And, yes, there is also the missing step of proving that what is in the tweets is copyrightable and owned -- but also that our use is not fair use, de minimis use, or any other of a long list of defenses.

As far as Mark Bennett - I would like to sue him and see how copyright law relating to tweets and photos in tweets wuld be tested. If can afford to do it I will. There is not a lot of case law for this in the U.S. I am not fan of aggregater sites who take journalist original work, screen grab it, and don't link or credit back to the original reporting. It think that's stealing page views and intellectual content.

As a site that reports on all sorts of nutty copyright cases, including quite a few claims from people believing, incorrectly, that aggregation is "stealing," it is possible that if she did sue Bennett, it would make for an interesting story for us to cover, though the crux of that coverage would most likely concern how ridiculous the case would be and the fact that it has about as close to zero a chance of succeeding as possible. Contrary to her claims, there is an awful lot of case law in the US concerning most of the key issues here, and all of it goes against her arguments.

Tim - please publish this in the story and write at the top there is an update.

I have taken over this story, and am publishing her statement right here in this post (along with our response, obviously). I will, however, add an update to the original post pointing people to this post.

Of course, that was not the end of the exchange. She also provided an "off the record" statement, saying that the background photo on her Twitter profile is covered by copyright, and demanded that we take down the image of her Twitter profile because "as a tech blogger I hoping you will respect copyright laws." We are leaving that image up, because even if the image is covered by copyright, we are using it under fair use rules, as part of reporting on her story. As such, it is perfectly reasonable to show her profile which includes her ludicrous comment that "tweets are not publishable" (which kicked off this whole thing). Since the bio section of your Twitter profile is able to be changed, it makes extra sense to show a screenshot to prove its accuracy.

It is unclear whether or not Ms. Buhl is familiar with fair use. I would hope that she investigates the issue carefully before further commenting about it or seeking any sort of legal action.

Buhl sent another, separate, email complaining about Tim's coverage of her arrest, much of which was based on a report from Patch. Her main concern here was that she is disputing the allegations, and she demanded that he note that the charges are "alleged" and that she "denies" them. Of course, both of those things were abundantly clear in the original post. The post does mention that her actions were alleged, and that a trial is upcoming. If she weren't fighting the charges, there wouldn't be any such trial. She further claims that "I am actually not charged with invasion or privacy or theft of anyone's personal information." Nowhere did we say that she was charged with any of those things, so there is nothing to correct on that front. Either way, in this post, we will note, again, that she is going to court over these issues, and thus, clearly, denies the "alleged" charges against her.

In the end, we're not at all clear on what she thinks she is accomplishing here, other than calling more attention to her initial claim that her tweets are "not publishable," and then calling more attention to her overall actions. We continue to stand by our reporting on this matter.

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CBS Sports Writer Feels It's OK To Issue 'Stealth' Corrections Because It's Just 'The Internet'

Tim Cushing — Wed, 9 Jan 2013 05:33:45 PST

It appears that there are still some writers out there who moved from print to an online presence while never having learned to properly "internet." Jon Heyman of CBSSports.com is one of them. Writing up his baseball Hall of Fame ballot, Heyman botched a few facts about Jack Morris in his push for the pitcher's inclusion, as Craig Calcaterra at NBC Sports pointed out:

Jon Heyman put up his Hall of Fame column this afternoon. For years he has pushed hard for Jack Morris for the Hall. He has long overstated Morris’ merits in my view, but it’s gotten to the point now where he’s simply making crap up:
He was thought good enough to be the ace on teams that had Bert Blyleven and Dave Stewart, and to receive Cy Young votes in seven seasons. I can’t allow his vast accomplishments to be re-evaluated downward by a new emphasis on different numbers.
Jack Morris and Bert Blyleven were never teammates. Jack Morris played one season with Dave Stewart. In that one season — 1993 — Morris was 7-12 with a 6.19 ERA. It’s possible that Heyman is calling Morris the “ace” of that 1993 Jays team because he got the Opening Day start, but he didn’t distinguish himself at all that year, he was out of the rotation by early September and was left off the postseason roster. Some ace.

Poynter followed up on the aftermath of this error, noting that Heyman's reaction to being called out in his fiction was to fix the mistake in the article without calling attention to the correction anywhere on the offending page. When called out on this 'stealth' correction, Jon Heyman responded with his least factual statement yet.

@thitchner not a simple mistake like that on the internet. I have never seen corrections listed below an internet story.
— Jon Heyman (@JonHeymanCBS) January 8, 2013

I'm not sure which parts of the internet Heyman is familiar with, but examining this statement (and its off-hand dismissal of the internet as a place beneath common courtesy or respect), I would hazard a guess that Heyman hasn't ventured much further than the pages run by CBS Sports. Andrew Beaujon points out that CBS Sports has failed to issue timely corrections on its website before, most notably its premature announcement that Penn State Joe Paterno had died -- a "scoop" it borrowed without attribution from a Penn State student website.

The "internet" that I'm familiar with is full of corrections. Updated posts happen all the time. Tom Hitchner helpfully pointed out a couple of recent corrections to Heyman -- one at the New York Times and one at Slate. Here at Techdirt, we update posts whenever clarification or correction is needed, as well as when new information flows in.

Everyone who realizes that the instantaneous give-and-take the internet provides requires this sort of transparency -- from the lowliest hobby blogger to the writer who's at least two or three sizes too small for the platform he's been given -- lists their corrections, or at the very least runs visible strikethrough. Apparently, Jon Heyman feels the internet is too insignificant to deserve honesty. If this is the attitude he's chosen to project, he doesn't deserve many readers.

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WSJ Still Hasn't Corrected Its Bogus Internet Revisionist Story, As Vint Cerf & Xerox Both Claim The Story Is Wrong

Mike Masnick — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 12:18:57 PDT

We recently discussed a Wall Street Journal opinion piece by its former publishers, L. Gordon Crovitz, in which he made some fantastically false claims about the origins of the internet. What was noteworthy was that while the WSJ got the story so totally wrong, lots of others, including bloggers, leapt into the fray to explain why Crovitz was wrong. Almost everyone he sourced or credited to support his argument that the internet was invented entirely privately at Xerox PARC and when Vint Cerf helped create TCP/IP, has spoken out to say he's wrong. And that list includes both Vint Cerf, himself, and Xerox. Other sources, including Robert Taylor (who was there when the internet was invented) and Michael Hiltzik, have rejected Crovitz's spinning of their own stories.

Basically, anyone and everyone is telling the WSJ that it got this story totally and completely wrong. You might think the WSJ would start making some corrections. Instead, it's made one single correction: That was a pretty minor correction, involving Crovitz being confused about how to understand how blockquotes work in HTML. But what about all of the other factual errors, including whoppers like saying that Tim Berners-Lee invented hyperlinks? Of course, considering the very premise of the article and nearly all of its supporting factoids were in error, it raises questions about how you do such a correction, other than crossing out the whole thing and posting a note admitting to the error (none of which has yet been done). Given the widespread discussion online about these errors -- both in blogs and in traditional media, it seems like the company's silence about the whole thing is just making the problem worse. Why won't the WSJ step up and issue a real correction on all of the errors?

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No That Won't Backfire At All: Questionable Story About Obama's Daughter Disappears From The Web

Mike Masnick — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 18:57:17 PDT

Generally speaking, the press has something of an implicit agreement that they don't use underage Presidential offspring in politically tinged stories. For obvious reasons, it's considered to be a pretty cynical move. Of course, if they actually do something newsworthy, it might be a different story. This afternoon a bunch of stories started appearing, talking about how President Obama's daughter Malia was traveling in Oaxaca, Mexico as part of a trip with some classmates (and 25 secret service agents). This story was reported on by the AFP wire service, and some tied it to the fact that the State Department recently issued a travel advisory urging Americans to stay away from parts of Mexico. Not surprisingly, some picked up on this story to suggest some sort of... something. Double standard? Hypocrisy? Of course, the details suggest this really was not much of a story. If you actually read the State Department warning, it makes it clear that there is no warning in place for Oaxaca -- so this trip doesn't appear to go against that warning.

It seems likely, then, that the AFP decided to pull back the story once someone pointed that out, but the story is now rapidly disappearing from a variety of online publications (big and small), leading to questions and easy political points about how the story is being "scrubbed." Google News listed about 27 versions of the story when I looked, and later, following the links, I found almost every single one of them was flat out gone. In most cases, they were replaced with a 404 (including The Daily Mail, the Telegraph, the Australian) or sometimes just redirecting people to a front page (Huffington Post and International Business Times). The only version I still found up was at TurkishPress.com, but it might not last very long.

Now, I tend to think that using the President's underage kids for a political story is generally a low blow and not particularly nice, but if there is something newsworthy happening, it should be fair game. I also think that, from the sound of it, this story got blown out of proportion by those who didn't bother to actually read the details of the destination or the State Department's specific warning which notes no problem at that destination.

But, having said all that, simply having the article disappear completely, rather than putting up a correction or an explanation of what happened, simply fuels both the conspiracy theories and the interest in the story. It's exactly the wrong way to go about dealing with the situation. There are a variety of possibilities here. The administration may have asked the press to pull the story, which would only generate more interest in the news. The AFP, upon realizing that it shouldn't have posted the story, may have issued a kill order/retraction of sorts. Or perhaps there's some other reasoning. But there are good ways to handle these situations and ways that are guaranteed to backfire. Simply making the articles disappear is pretty much guaranteed to backfire and generate more interest in the story, even if it's a total non-story. Replacing the original story with a "hey, we thought this, but we got it wrong," would have been much more effective.

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The Day The WSJ Attributed My Quote To Someone Else

Mike Masnick — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 12:41:55 PST

Late Sunday night, I got an email from L. Gordon Crovitz, the former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, saying that he had an apology he wished to offer, as he had misattributed a quote of mine in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece about Europe's attempt to create a "right to forget." He took a quote from my Techdirt blog post on the subject from earlier this month, but accidentally attributed it to Adam Thierer of the Progress & Freedom Foundation (PFF). The writeup was doubly incorrect, as not only was the quote not Thierer's but PFF shut down at the end of September. You can see a screenshot here (since the actual article is behind the WSJ's infamous paywall): You can see a larger image that shows the quote in context if you'd like. Now, let me be clear: I don't think this is that big of a deal, and I told Crovitz exactly that in an email response (I also told that to Thierer, who had emailed me separately to make me aware of this and to note that he had not "plagiarized" from me). Mistakes happen. We all make them at times -- and I probably make more of them than others.

What interested me, however, is how the WSJ would respond. Crovitz told me that the paper version had already gone out, but that he had asked the Journal to fix the web version. So I watched during the course of the day to see if it happened. As of me writing this, it still attributes the quote to Thierer. Around noon on Monday, I had some fun and tweeted that the WSJ had quoted me, but attributed my quote to someone else. Following that tweet, Priya Ganapati, an editor at the WSJ tweeted back asking which story. I pointed it out, but didn't hear anything back. As I said, as of this posting, the story still has not been updated.

Again, this really is not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. The quote was nothing special. I've been quoted in the WSJ before and perhaps I'll be quoted in the future (well, perhaps not after this post!). Three things, however, struck me as interesting about this: (1) how much time it appears to take to get the WSJ to correct such things and (2) how people likely would have reacted if this had gone in the opposite direction and (3) why "links" are a good thing.

Imagine if I had misquoted a story in the WSJ on Techdirt. Within minutes, I can assure you, our comments would be full of people pointing it out (and probably accusing me of purposely misleading people). And, hopefully, soon after that, I would have corrected the mistake and apologized for it. And, that's what I consider to be a good thing: as I said, I make mistakes. Plenty of them. But the community here makes for pretty damn good fact checkers, and they work hard at keeping me honest. It's something I appreciate. One commenter, Ryan Radia, did mention the mistake in his own comment on the WSJ article, but I believe it was after my tweet (Ryan follows me on Twitter). But there has been no response to that comment as of me writing this.

Finally, this highlights the value of links. While not possible in the paper version, it would have been quite easy for the Wall Street Journal to link to my blog post where I made that quote, which would have made it clear for anyone who clicked the link to see who actually wrote the story. Of course, that would require admitting that the quote had simply been pulled from a blog, and the article at least leaves the impression that Crovitz spoke with Thierer to get the quote.

Now, of course, the WSJ is a big newspaper with lots of busy people doing things more important than getting a misattributed quote fixed. But in an era when we keep hearing how important the big legacy press is, and how bloggers have some sort of "lower standards" when it comes to their own efforts, it strikes me that this is an example of where that's simply not true. We both might have made that mistake, but it's likely that I would have first linked to the source material in question and would likely (I hope!) have been faster to correct it. This isn't to say that blogs are "better," but to challenge the idea that the big newspapers automatically have higher standards on these sorts of things.

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If Only Newspapers Put As Much Effort Into Correcting Errors That Didn't Involve Captain Kirk & Captain Picard

Mike Masnick — Tue, 9 Nov 2010 11:34:00 PST

On the Media points us to a rather extensive and amusing correction from News.com.au concerning its mistake in suggesting Captain Kirk was in charge of Captain Picard's spaceship in Star Trek:

YESTERDAY, a news.com.au article incorrectly stated that the Star Trek starship USS Enterprise-E, otherwise known as model NNC-1701-E, was the successor to Captain Kirk's original USS Enterprise.

It has since been brought to our attention that the NNC-1701-E in fact came two models after Captain Kirk retired and was under the command of Captain Jean Luc Picard.

User "Your Mum's Lunch" led the charge of those who correctly pointed out that after losing the original Enterprise to the Klingons, Captain Kirk was given the Excelsior Class Enterprise-B as a stop-gap measure until the refit of the Enterprise-A was completed.

Kirk's last ship was the Ambassador Class Enterprise-C.

Enterprise-D and Enterprise-E were in fact, the first of the Galaxy Class models and were under the command of Captain Picard.

It goes on from there, noting additional concerns about "the incorrect use of the term 'hyperspace' in describing warp drive technology." Obviously, this is a very tongue-in-cheek mocking error correction (and, if you don't believe that, just check out the photo they included with the article), poking fun at people who take Star Trek just a bit too seriously.

Furthermore, not to jump on the Star Trek nitpick wagon here, but even the correction itself is in need of correction. Any Trekker worth their salt knows that the Enterprise's designation is "NCC-1701-E" and not "NNC-1701-E."

That said, however, what struck me is how rarely you see any sort of actual correction of this nature for important stuff that publications actually do get wrong. Usually, they just make the changes to the article, and maybe append a small note at the bottom about how "changes were made," but rarely do they explain the mistakes that were made, or publish a separate article explaining the errors. And that's why the original, error-filled stories often get more attention than the corrected versions.

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Sunday Times: Pay Up To Have Us Tell You How We Were Totally Wrong In Our Climate Change Story

Mike Masnick — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 11:44:03 PDT

Now that Rupert Murdoch has put up his paywalls around The Times of London and the Sunday Times, it's creating some interesting moral and journalistic dilemmas. Earlier this year, apparently the Sunday Times ran a highly publicized report claiming that climate change scientists had made predictions about rainforest threats from climate change that were based on bogus information. Unfortunately, it turns out that that the bogus part was actually in the coverage by The Times, and not the researchers. Months later, The Times has issued a massive retraction. While the Sunday Times has simply disappeared the original article from the web (article? what article?), the retraction is behind the paywall. This is leading some to question the journalistic ethics here. If you put out a huge, publicly-accessible, fear-mongering report that accuses researchers of relying on junk science... and it turns out to be totally wrong, doesn't there seem to be something wrong about then putting the retraction behind a paywall? I recognize that the Sunday Times' strategy is for all of its content to be paywalled, but there are times when you make an exception. This seems like an important one.

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