Down The Memory Hole
Wow, Bob from Confederate Yankee has caught a major smoking gun here, it would appear. Want to know why altered photos and made up news doesn't bother Greg Mitchell? Because he, or someone in his organization appears to be altering archived stories to change their meaning.
Someone substantially altered the text of the mediainfo.com story, after six different bloggers cited the article. If you type in the URL of http://www.mediainfo.com/ and press "enter" so that you could investigate who mediainfo.com belongs to, wondering how they could change such an old story so quickly, the URL will resolve to adweek.com.
Adweek is owned by VNU Business Media, the same company that runs media web sites BrandWeek, MediaWeek and–you guessed it–Editor & Publisher, where Greg Mitchell is the editor on the hotseat.
It is readily apparent that someone at Editor and Publisher has been manipulating the news a lot more recently than 1967, and if I was a corporate officer at VNU Business Media, I think I'd start my Monday morning by asking who has access rights to post and repost stories, and I'd make a thorough investigation of the server logs to see who uploaded the changes to that article Friday afternoon, sometime between 2:30 PM and 5:01 PM. I’d ask, because that someone is torpedoing my company’s credibility.
When they talk to "that person," I hope they remind him that 1967 is long past, but character flaws are forever.
Update: Ed Driscoll notes that the original, unaltered article exists on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.
This is not a small matter at all.
Blogosphere, Media | Gaius Saturday, 26 August , 2006
By Jim Treacher, Saturday, 26 August , 2006 @ 1:38 pm
I wouldn’t go so far as to say he’s changing the article’s meaning (I assume he thinks he’s providing “context”), but making a change like that with no indication that he’s done so is dishonest and creepy. Exhibit Z.
By Gaius, Saturday, 26 August , 2006 @ 1:43 pm
Highly unethical, but then he has amply proven that already.
By dpaulin, Saturday, 26 August , 2006 @ 9:55 pm
It’s unfair to pillar somebody for a minor mistake or a momentary lapse in judgment. To err is human. But as other bloggers have noted, the main problem here is the “cover-up.â€
It may be a minor cover-up, to be sure. But it’s an egregious one because E&P fashions itself as a “watchdog’ and conscience of the newspaper industry — an industry that’s especially hard on those who commit the most trivial transgressions.
As to Mitchell’s youthful dishonesty in the late 1960s, I could overlook that based on youthful immaturity and a lack of journalistic training. However, I sense Mitchell probably did know the difference between right and wrong at the time. Accordingly, his lapse probably was more of a character issue; and the same may be said of the current controversy.
There’s no denying that Mitchell has remade E&P into a more interesting magazine than it used to be. Unfortunately, he also has let the magazine become a vehicle for his 1960s-era leftist ideology. His failure to keep his political views in check and publish a more balanced magazine also has something to do with character issues. Ultimately, Mitchell’s predilection for letting ideology trump all is typical of the angry left, many of whose members may be found in the MSM and among E&P’s readers.