Guest essay by Leo Goldstein
NY Times regularly revises its articles after publication. The revisions are substantial, undisclosed, and are nothing like real time updates in developing stories. These are regular articles that undergo dramatic changes that appear as if NY Times editors received a commissar’s call stressing the party line and demanding the article matches it exactly, with the NY Times editors dutifully obliging.
I recently stumbled on one of such revisions. Within hours, the description of Scott Pruitt, the newly appointed EPA head, in the NY Times article went from being an “ally of fossil fuel Industry,” to a “climate change dissenter,” to a “climate change denialist.” Later, I was pointed to a helpful website newsdiffs.org. Newsdiffs archives multiple versions of news articles and shows the differences between them. That article has been revised or rewritten at least six times after its original publication, all without any notice to the readers.
On the topic of climate debate, the most prominent rewrite seen is the replacement of the term “climate skeptic” with “climate denialist.” Also witnessed, is the attempt to do some damage control, like replacing “Obama’s new climate change regulations” that reporters probably heard firsthand from government officials, with “Obama’s new clean air regulations.”
Examples, limited to the climate debate
The following article was completely re-written from its original version on January 14-15. Then, on January 18, the sentence, “Obama’s new climate change regulations are driving electric utilities to shut down coal plants,” was rewritten by replacing the term “climate change” with “clean air,” thus becoming: “Obama’s new clean air regulations are driving electric utilities to shut down coal plants”:
http://newsdiffs.org/article-history/www.nytimes.com/2016/01/15/us/politics/in-climate-move-obama-to-halt-new-coal-mining-leases-on-public-lands.html (By CORAL DAVENPORT)
Multiple changes, including changing the word Skeptics to Denialists in the title:
http://newsdiffs.org/diff/1376719/1376823/https%3A/www.nytimes.com/2017/04/12/climate/scott-pruitt-epa-endangerment-finding.html (By CORAL DAVENPORT)
The article was revised 14 times:
http://newsdiffs.org/article-history/www.nytimes.com/2016/11/22/us/politics/donald-trump-visit.html
(By MICHAEL D. SHEAR, JULIE HIRSCHFELD, MAGGIE HABERMAN)
Multiple changes, including in the authorship:
http://newsdiffs.org/article-history/www.nytimes.com/2017/01/18/science/earth-highest-temperature-record.html (By JUSTIN GILLIS and JOHN SCHWARTZ)
For example, this link shows multiple changes to the body of the article:
The title was completely re-written:
Another title that was re-written:
http://newsdiffs.org/diff/1309853/1309964/www.nytimes.com/2016/12/02/science/global-warming-daily-mail-breitbart.html (By HENRY FOUNTAIN)
Multiple substantial changes:
http://newsdiffs.org/article-history/www.nytimes.com/2016/10/15/world/africa/kigali-deal-hfc-air-conditioners.html (By CORAL DAVENPORT)
At the time of this writing, some of these articles are different from their last versions in newsdiffs, and at least one seems similar to the initial version in newsdiffs. Probably newsdiffs monitors the news articles only for short time. Also, NY Times’ website may send different versions of the same article to different readers.
Remember the BBC Scandal in 2008
This brings to mind the well-known BBC scandal, when the BBC changed a published weather-related article to be more climate alarmist after exchanging few emails with Jo Abbess, a climate activist who then gloated about it. (See also JM1 and JM2). One thing that escaped attention: Jo Abbess was active in the local Agenda 21 chapter (Poole Agenda 21) and was connected to other British alarmist organizations. The published email exchange between poor Roger Harrabin and Jo Abbess was just a small part of the pressure and brainwashing campaign that broke the BBC.
Footnotes
Curiously, newsdiffs.org was created with funding from the leftist Knight Foundation largely with the intent to discover content re-writing that’s in favor of conservatives. Newsdiffs.org was covered by the NY Times in 2012. Apparently, NY Times still had some integrity back then. The NY Times has been doing stealthy revising since at least 2015 and seems to increase their frequency and severity after the elections. I will be posting more examples of stealthy content revising and fake news on my site.
Newsdiffs.org monitors only five websites and one cannot easily search in it (I suggest using https://web-beta.archive.org/web/*/newsdiffs.org) but the software is open-sourced and available at https://github.com/ecprice/newsdiffs.
Thanks to H.J. for collaboration in the research and writing this article.
Footnote by Anthony Watts
WUWT occasionally has changes to articles from time to time, and we have a policy on it:
Stories that have been posted may get edited in the first hour after they first appear. Sometimes errors or mistakes (particularly in formatting) aren’t seen until the post is published. If something doesn’t look right and the post is brand-new, try refreshing in a few minutes. Of course, after an hour if something is still wrong, don’t hesitate to leave a comment to point it out.
The main reason for changing of articles at WUWT is spelling and formatting mistakes, and they usually occur within the first hour. Sometimes simple mistakes are made,in the body or in the title, and commenters catch them almost immediately. A good example is in the story New ‘Karl-buster’ paper confirms ‘the pause’, and climate models failure. The word “sleight” was misspelled as “slight”, and that was fixed right away and noted in the comments with thanks to the commenter who spotted it.
Sometimes, there’s errors related [to] title spelling, such as the article: AL.com thinks ‘global warming’ is increasing ticks in Alabama, except it’s cooled over the last century there
I boobed, and typed AI instead of AL originally so I had to fix that. I left a note at the bottom of the article:
Note: about 5 mins after publication, the title was changed to correct a misspelling.
And on occasion, we have a factual error in the article. These are handled via either strikeouts (if the error is multiple words) or as a word or two in [brackets] if it is a simple fix.
We aren’t perfect here at WUWT, nobody who publishes online is, but I try to make sure that fixes are known to the readers.
Stealthy editorial changes is consistent with similarly stealthy land temperature changes…..or so it seems to me – particularly when the raw data is deleted/omitted.
“Stealthy editorial changes is consistent with similarly stealthy land temperature changes”
Both kinds of changes seem aimed at promoting the CAGW narrative.
The New York Times.
Here today, changed tomorrow.
(Perhaps Hansen is one of the editors?)
When it come to Yellow Journalism the New York Time excels like to other!
“Remember The Maine”!
Ordered in 1886 and commissioned in 1895, classified as an armored cruiser, built in response to naval forces in Latin America.
Maine was out of date by the time she entered service and sunk by an explosion in Havana Harbor 15 February 1889.
Popular opinion regarding the sinking was inflamed by articles printed in the “yellow press” such as those by William Randolph Hearst (publisher of the San Francisco Examiner and the New York Journal) and Joseph Pulitzer (publisher of the St. Louis Dispatch and the New York World — leading national voice of the Democratic Party of the day and for whom the Fabled Pulitzer Prize is named after and who established the Columbia University Journalism School) blamed Spain.
Yellow journalism, a.k.a. yellow press, presents stories, “news”, with little or no legitimate facts, and rely on exaggerations, scandal-mongering and sensationalism.
Ref. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Maine_%28ACR-1%29
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulitzer_Prize
“Yellow journalism, a.k.a. yellow press, presents stories, “news”, with little or no legitimate facts, and rely on exaggerations, scandal-mongering and sensationalism.”
Sounds just like the MSM. Here the poor people of Earth are trying to sort out and deal with their problems, and they have to wade through this storm of MSM misinformation and try to make sense of it all.
We’ll muddle through though, because more and more people are starting to get wise to what is going on with our elites and our elite news media. They are starting to see that they are not being told the truth.
“When it come to Yellow Journalism the New York Time excels like to other!”
The NYT was not associated with either Hearst or Pulitzer. It’s original report on the incident is here. It is quite balanced.
Whoosh.
The sound the point makes as it goes completely over Nick’s head.
“The sound the point makes”
So what was that point?
The heart and soul of the left wing/socialist/communist (pick one) agenda has always been the lie. Tell it loud enough and often enough and it becomes the truth. Control the educational institutions and news media and you have the battle almost won. Blame others for what you’ve done wrong and take credit for anything good. It never changes. Let’s not forget, either, that fascism was a form of national socialism, not at all right wing. So, I’m not exactly shocked by this but it is great to see the specifics brought to light.
“Control the educational institutions and news media and you have the battle almost won.”
I think that’s about where we are at, too. We have an uphill battle on our hands.
That battle is gonna be fought right here, on the internet.
“…but at the length truth will out.” William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice 1596
The truth that there is no consensus about the human impact on climate will come to light.
The truth that the climate models are modeling the theory of AGW, not the Earth’s climate, will be revealed..
The truth that the value for climate sensitivity to rising CO2 in the models is a random-ass-guess will eventually be understood.
The truth that the way science is now funded has a bigger impact on what scientists say than , will become common knowledge.
Even the truth that the whole climate change paradigm was orchestrated by a relatively small group of self-anointed elites, for the purpose of gaining more power and control over the masses, will eventually be a given!
The question is…how many people will die from this illusion before the ‘truth will out’?
Good summation, jclarke341.
You do not consider what you WILL do.
And you do not consider WHAT you will do.
themselves to blame.
This ordinary left / right squat.
As if something were done with.
Disgusting.
Self-confirmation:
I know it better.
___________________________________________
Better bet better, you better better.
The AP occasionally pulls articles that disappear entirely. Of course a savvy citizen may be able to locate a cached copy. There is one case of this that sticks in my mind, it was on the 26 of June 2012 published by Seth Borenstein in an AP article that claimed a new world-record for a high temp. in Death Valley. Seth actually brought his own thermometer, set it in the sun and used it as the evidence for his claim. (Sans the Stevenson Screen). That article was up less than 90 minutes. I went back to get a copy of it and couldn’t find it.
Curiously enough it was claimed here only a few days ago that blogs were better than journals
since they could fix errors more quickly. And yet now if a newspaper changes an online article
that is seem as a bad thing.
It should be noted that if you want a fixed version of the NY Times then you can buy a hard copy
or go to the library and look up what they printed in each edition for a particular day. There is
nothing to state that the NY Times should have a website or that the website should be fixed and
unalterable once things are published. What counts as best journalistic practice for an online
news site is still evolving and is in flux.
If you don’t bother what’s changed and why, give me your wallet for a while. You’ll get it back.
Good point, jaakkokateenkorva! 🙂
Even websites providing like justia which provide free access to legal info may have gotten in on the act if you believe a Dec 14, 2011 American Thinker dot com post;
“On October 20, 2011, New Jersey attorney Leo Donofrio accused online legal research behemoth Justia.com of surgically redacting important information from their publication of 25 U.S. Supreme Court opinions which cite Minor v. Happersett, an 1874 decision which arguably contains language that appears to disqualify anyone from presidential eligibility who wasn’t born in the country to parents who were citizens.”
Adjustments have been going on for a long time and it seems that the way to combat the disinformation aspect of the adjustment game may be as much “cultural” as it is procedural/legal.
“Poor Roger Harrabin.” Really? The warmist spokesman for the BBC.
I think he had been browbeaten into becoming the warmist spokesman.
I don’t mind if simple spelling and grammar issues are corrected without notification in the article. So long as the changes don’t change the meaning of the sentence.
Besides, if you read through the posts you will find 1 to 20 people calling Anthony’s attention to the error.
Rules for Climate Radicals; Power is What the Enemy Thinks You Have
https://co2islife.wordpress.com/2017/04/16/rules-for-climate-radicals-power-is-what-the-enemy-thinks-you-have/
In a radio interview I heard some years ago a BBC employee recalls his first day of work at the media establishment. An experienced colleague-mentor led him upstairs and out onto the roof. The two of them then stood together on the edge of the roof and urinated down on the people many floors below at ground level. (They were both male BTW.) This, the mentor explained was an important rite of passage impressing on a new employee the correct BBC attitude to hold towards the general public.
It has been many decades since the forlorn ideal of media impartiality disappeared without trace from the BBC. It has for years stopped even trying to conceal its true nature as out-and-out propagandist for the hard left.
However by espousing the left the media have destroyed the left. When those BBC patriarchs did their ritual territorial pissing on the people below, they made the mistake of believing their own group-think about the general public being intellectually inferior and servile to a ruling class of which the BBC was the flamboyant aristocracy. The people were not brain-washed and saw through the cheap manipulativeness of the left-press. Humans haven’t emerged from a billion years of evolution by being stupid.
Therefore several decades of airwaves filled with hard-left agitprop has produced a reaction in the opposite direction. People are waking up to the fact that they have lived their whole lives listening to an unopposed unelected undemocratic stalinist hard left press. They are finding that they don’t have to get on the train to Siberia if they vote conservative (labelled with the hate-speech term “Tory” analogous to the “N” word for afrocaribbeans) or if they hunt or fish 🐟 or if they are church-going Christians (the left are oddly besotted with the arch-chauvenistic random murdering muslems but seeth with genocidal hatred at any hint of christianity).
The great BBC-CNN project failed. People still create and work for private companies. People still think right-of-center thoughts. They still feel pride and loyalty toward their own country and respect and gratitude toward those who fought wars for survival and independence against left-wing dictators. They continue to find women and men to be different from each other. They still consider it OK to have a mother and a father. They sometimes hunt, fish and watch sports. And with the internet they form global communities who find the truth for themselves and turn their backs on a paternalistic hard-left press who tried and failed to force everyone too see the world through a red mist of Marxist hatefilled pernicious Malthusian nihilism. All that left-hate can now fade away like a morning mist on a sunny ☀️ day.
BBC & Guardian are well known for this STEALTH editing
For them news reporting = “NARRATIVE CONSTRUCTING”
… as if they are the PR dept of an NGO or political party.
They’d argue that “news is ongoing and pages are simply updated as info comes in”
However it also happens on prewritten editorial pieces when they realise they have made a mistake or can turn up the spin against skeptics.
You’ll see that NewsSniffer https://www.newssniffer.co.uk/ monitors them
And On Twitter twitter.com/bbc_diff montitors some BBC edits
You’ll note that new BBC article about Labour Party’s plan to award 4 new national holidays has been “tuned up” 7 times
https://www.newssniffer.co.uk/articles/1366984/diff/3/4
BTW Creating Holidays is effectively the same as INCREASING taxes
… cos for every day lost the gov has to hire extra Labour at holiday rates
News Sniffer monitors some NYT
“It currently monitors a few key feeds from the BBC News website, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Independent, The Washington Post and The Intercept.” since 2010