If a newspaper makes a mistake, they have an enormous degree of flexibility to paint their reporting in less negative light if they can just summarize what happened. Like, would you be satisfied if they just wrote "This story has been retracted"? Or what about "This story has been retracted because we didn't interview the person maligned"? The best way to ensure that readers can understand all the mistakes that happened, and thereby update their opinion of the newspaper/journalist, is if they can see exactly what was said.
>If a newspaper makes a mistake, they have an enormous degree of flexibility to paint their reporting in less negative light if they can just summarize what happened
But they can't do that, after the newspaper is printed you can find a copy of it with the original story, likely at the library. Similarly, copies of this story are still available online, just not on the NPR page. The equivalence of your suggestion in a newspaper would be their printing the entire story again in the next edition with a retraction, and I assume you could see how that could cause confusion.
> But they can't do that, after the newspaper is printed you can find a copy of it with the original story, likely at the library.
This only prevents them from giving outright false summaries. It does not prevent them from casting things in a more favorable light. Only a tiny subset of readers will use the library or archive.org, and they won't be able to say NPR lied.
> The equivalence of your suggestion in a newspaper would be their printing the entire story again in the next edition with a retraction
This would only be fully equivalent if the pre-digital newspaper printed every story in their archives every day. The closest analogy that exists is [new content]=[today's print paper] and [online archives]=[previous print newspapers]
That said, the online archives don't have a perfect analog in the pre-digital world. But importantly, they are simply not meant to represent a collection of only true statements. They are rather a record of what was said when. Note, for instance, that newspapers do not expunge from their online archives all stories that end up having false statements or implications through no fault of the newspaper (e.g., government officials lied or criminal convictions were overturned). Retraction is about admitting journalistic fault for the record.
Now, we can separately make arguments that individuals should be able to have false negative information about themselves removed from (easy) public access, a la the right to be forgotten. (In the current case, this could be accomplished by simply censoring the name of the subject of the article while preserving the rest of the text.) But this is a completely separate justification (which unavoidably pits the rights of the individual to not be defamed against the rights of the public to be informed) from the argument that all retracted stories (even those that defame no one) should be expunged from the online archives.
>This only prevents them from giving outright false summaries. It does not prevent them from casting things in a more favorable light. Only a tiny subset of readers will use the library or archive.org, and they won't be able to say NPR lied.
This is the state of things, huge errors in headline stories are retracted in the following issue with merely a line saying they were wrong. There have been examples of people getting an innocent verdict incorrectly labeled guilty in the story. If transparency is your goal, the story calling them guilty should be reprinted with corrections noted. That would be more transparent, but would not be beneficial to anyone.
>that all retracted stories (even those that defame no one) should be expunged from the online archives.
Again, I do not wish the story expunged from online archives, and it does not appear NPR is doing anything like this. Removing it from their personal archive is a different matter. Leaving it up provides more transparency, but provides no benefit. The error made is clear enough in the retraction, suspicious parties can still see their full error should they want to, and their erroneous story is not causing additional issues by being spread.
This system can absolutely be abused, but as the archive exists it would be easy to tell when it was. Your proposed change allows for a different kind of abuse, also easy to detect, and opens the door for confusion to cause issues. Hell, the only positive you can name is it allows people to easily judge mistakes. Mistakes are inevitable, they need to be judged for their malicious actions, which is still possible in this system.
> This is the state of things, huge errors in headline stories are retracted in the following issue with merely a line saying they were wrong.
I agree, this is the state of things for most newspapers (which I'm criticizing), but not, for example, for science journals.
> If transparency is your goal, the story calling them guilty should be reprinted with corrections noted.
Again, that would be sensible only if the entire archives were reprinted each day. There are economic limitations for print newspapers that make this infeasible. But if it were the case that print newspapers could feasibly re-printed their entire archives each day, then yes, I endorse them leaving the disclaimed erroneous story in those archives, to be re-printed each day.
That's not the same thing as re-printing the disclaimed erroneous story on the front page.
> >that all retracted stories (even those that defame no one) should be expunged from the online archives.
> Again, I do not wish the story expunged from online archives, and it does not appear NPR is doing anything like this. Removing it from their personal archive is a different matter.
Sorry I wasn't clear. When I write "online archives", I mean NPR's online archives. I am not talking about archive.org or similar.
> suspicious parties can still see their full error should they want to
I would agree that this was the case if the majority of internet users knew what archive.org is. In fact, I bet that less (probably much less) than 5% do. Thus they are effectively hiding the erroneous story from almost the entire readership.
