Dear News Organizations: Please stop deleting your old stories

Looking for a few political articles lately and I ran across the problem of media companies deleting their archives. So I had to find other sites hosting articles with these headlines:

Former FDA official: “We are fortunate more hasn’t gone wrong” - http://americablog.com/2008/03/former-fda-official-we-are-fortunate-more-hasnt-gone-wrong.html (On how the Republican Party has stripped funding from the FDA to the point it's practically useless)

Conquering the Drawbacks of Democracy - http://watchingthewatchers.org/news/1290/conservative-group-calls-bush (In which a conservative pundit argues the case for President Bush slaughtering Iraqis, colonizing Iraq with Americans, and leading a military coup in which he (no shit) declares himself President for Life)

... and there's another one, I believe it was in the Washington Post around 2002, about a summit between American Christian conservatives and fundamentalist Muslims in which the Americans were hilariously surprised at how many beliefs they had in common with the Muslim fundamentalists.

I know why the news orgs do this and it's no nefarious political plot to throw history down the memory hole -- it's just that news outfits are cheap and always looking for ways to cut corners (my paper recently abandoned the idea of a physical office!).

But it does a real disservice when people aren't able to adequately research the actions of political movements and parties, and that was one thing that was supposed to be great about the Internet.

P.S. -- found a mention of that Post article, as usual, elsewhere:

Political pragmatism also leads domestic religious strategists to work with countries and leaders they might otherwise abhor.

"We look at [Islamic theocracies] as allies, not necessarily as friends," Austin Ruse, president of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, told The Washington Post. "We have realized that without countries like Sudan, abortion would have been recognized as a universal human right in a U.N. document."

https://www.au.org/church-state/september-2002-church-state/featured/strange-bedfellows

When everything becomes internet based only and other books and written information disappears then it will be easy for some to rewrite anything as they choose and/or 'lose' large chunks of other stuff...


How very 'progressive'...!

Tommy Monk wrote:When everything becomes internet based only and other books and written information disappears then it will be easy for some to rewrite anything as they choose and/or 'lose' large chunks of other stuff...


How very 'progressive'...!

Umm Tommy Pre-internet how would you go about getting a news article from the other side of the world that is over a decade old?

you couldn't even being, even knowing it existed was almost impossible.

Maybe a solution would be public server farms to store a copy of this, much like public libraries did in the age of hard print.

Also it is not necessarily gone but it is now in the ether existing in various caches across the globe but without a fixed http address... I.e it is a lot harder to find now

Given with one hand and then gradually taken away with the other is the 'progressive' way...

Tommy Monk wrote:Given with one hand and then gradually taken away with the other is the 'progressive' way...

Could you try putting another record on maybe?

Ben_Reilly wrote:Looking for a few political articles lately and I ran across the problem of media companies deleting their archives. So I had to find other sites hosting articles with these headlines:

Former FDA official: “We are fortunate more hasn’t gone wrong” - http://americablog.com/2008/03/former-fda-official-we-are-fortunate-more-hasnt-gone-wrong.html (On how the Republican Party has stripped funding from the FDA to the point it's practically useless)

Conquering the Drawbacks of Democracy - http://watchingthewatchers.org/news/1290/conservative-group-calls-bush (In which a conservative pundit argues the case for President Bush slaughtering Iraqis, colonizing Iraq with Americans, and leading a military coup in which he (no shit) declares himself President for Life)

... and there's another one, I believe it was in the Washington Post around 2002, about a summit between American Christian conservatives and fundamentalist Muslims in which the Americans were hilariously surprised at how many beliefs they had in common with the Muslim fundamentalists.

I know why the news orgs do this and it's no nefarious political plot to throw history down the memory hole -- it's just that news outfits are cheap and always looking for ways to cut corners (my paper recently abandoned the idea of a physical office!).

But it does a real disservice when people aren't able to adequately research the actions of political movements and parties, and that was one thing that was supposed to be great about the Internet.

Very true Ben and the Tories did just that. They removed stuff which they didn't want people to remember much of which exposed them for calling for deregulation of the banks and committing them to match Labour's spending plans.

Didn't make much difference really as their hypocrisy had already been well published elsewhere.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/nov/13/conservative-party-archive-speeches-internet

Irn Bru wrote:

Ben_Reilly wrote:Looking for a few political articles lately and I ran across the problem of media companies deleting their archives. So I had to find other sites hosting articles with these headlines:

Former FDA official: “We are fortunate more hasn’t gone wrong” - http://americablog.com/2008/03/former-fda-official-we-are-fortunate-more-hasnt-gone-wrong.html (On how the Republican Party has stripped funding from the FDA to the point it's practically useless)

Conquering the Drawbacks of Democracy - http://watchingthewatchers.org/news/1290/conservative-group-calls-bush (In which a conservative pundit argues the case for President Bush slaughtering Iraqis, colonizing Iraq with Americans, and leading a military coup in which he (no shit) declares himself President for Life)

... and there's another one, I believe it was in the Washington Post around 2002, about a summit between American Christian conservatives and fundamentalist Muslims in which the Americans were hilariously surprised at how many beliefs they had in common with the Muslim fundamentalists.

I know why the news orgs do this and it's no nefarious political plot to throw history down the memory hole -- it's just that news outfits are cheap and always looking for ways to cut corners (my paper recently abandoned the idea of a physical office!).

But it does a real disservice when people aren't able to adequately research the actions of political movements and parties, and that was one thing that was supposed to be great about the Internet.

Very true Ben and the Tories did just that. They removed stuff which they didn't want people to remember much of which exposed them for calling for deregulation of the banks and committing them to match Labour's spending plans.

Didn't make much difference really as their hypocrisy had already been well published elsewhere.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/nov/13/conservative-party-archive-speeches-internet

Good to see that -- hope someone's been doing that with UKIP as well, since they seem to change their tune on major issues every few months

http://politicalscrapbook.net/2015/01/leaked-minutes-from-ukip-ruling-body-we-want-to-privatise-nhs-but-public-wont-let-us/