The public record is under assault

Wall Street Journal Front Page Screen Shot

We have a problem. It’s a big problem, and it’s only going to get worse. The public record is being tampered with, subverted and in some cases destroyed entirely.

Last week I was bumping around the Web and I found a blurb on the Wall Street Journal about a plagiarized story. Evidently, the Journal ran a piece called “Homeward Bound” by freelance writer Mona Sarika, and portions of the story were either fabricated or stolen from other publications. In other words, it was a crap story and an embarrassment, so the Journal took the story off its Web site. It’s gone. It doesn’t exist anymore on the Wall Street Journal Web site.

But that’s bullshit. That story only existed online. There is no printed public record made of that story and now it’s gone forever.

I don’t care about the actual story itself. It was a plagiarized pile of donkey dung, but I do care about maintaining the public record. So I went to Google, found a cached version of the story and published it here.

By deleting the story from their Web site, the Wall Street Journal sanitized a very embarrassing situation.

So in 10 years, if someone is researching the accuracy of online media, for instance, that story won’t be there. Sure if you go to the Web address for that story, you’ll see a little blurb about the incident, but you can’t read the story. And how long will the Journal even maintain that link? One year? Maybe two?

The bottom line is that if a news organization publishes anything, it should stay published. If there’s a problem with the story, update the story and note the changes. If the story is a plagiarized pile of horse hockey, then put your we-screwed-up-big-time blurb right at the top of the story to let readers know how badly you failed. But no matter what happens, don’t delete a story from the public record.