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Tuesday, November 03, 2009
Courts - More on: Louisville paper gets it wrong re Kentucky AG "advising" the Corrections Department not to follow a recent state Supreme Court ruling; Implications
Yesterday the Louisville Courier Journal, at the behest of the Kentucky Attorney General, published a correction in its printed paper about an editorial it had run on Oct. 31st. But, as far as I can tell, it simply deleted the online version without any comment or explanation. See these ILB entries from Nov. 2nd and Oct. 31st for more.
For some commentary on similar situations, see this Oct. 30th entry by Jonathan H. Adler in The Volokh Conspiracy. The heading: "Revising Web-based Newspaper Articles Without Informing Readers — NYT Edition." Adler writes:
This is not the first time I’ve noticed the web site of a prominent news organization failing to disclose that it had edited the web-based version of a story after initial publication. . . . Is this now common practice? If so, it seems to be a major failing. Responsible bloggers routinely disclose anything more than the most minor stylistic and typographical revisions to published posts. I would think newspaper websites could do the same. Indeed, shouldn’t newspapers at least match the disclosure norms observed by bloggers? After all, they’re the real journalists.And from a reader's comment on a comment:
Comment: Has it ever not been common practice? Even the dead tree versions of newspaper articles often change without notice between various editions or print runs. Why does this continue to surprise anyone? Should it really bother you?Implications. The above may appear to be nit-picking, but think of the implications in the legal world. And these are not uncommon in most jurisdictions.Comment on the comment: That perhaps explains why it’s commonly done, but it doesn’t excuse it. When a dead-tree newspaper put out a new edition, the old one didn’t suddenly disappear, but that’s what happens with online newspapers, unless somebody just happens to preserve a copy. There’s no good reason that I can think of why online media shouldn’t archive all previous versions of an article, available from the article’s page. Wikipedia does that now.
- Example 1: A court opinion may be posted online. Several days later some seemingly minor corrections are made. The corrected version is posted in place of the earlier version with no indication. So different people have different copies of the opinion, depending upon when they acquired them.
- Example 2. Various, often undated, directives of state agencies may be posted online, changed, replaced, with no indication.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on November 3, 2009 09:17 AM
Posted to Courts in general