Mark Liberman, commenting on the scandalous behavior of the BBC's science reporting yet again, writes:
And speaking of shame, the 404 from the BBC is not just because of some page relocation: searching the BBC News and BBCi sites yields a message that 'There are no websites that match "chatnannies".' Imagine their reaction if some politician tried this: endorsing an apparently nonsensical proposal, saying nothing for a three weeks in response to serious doubts from credible sources, and then silently removing the proposal document and trying to pretend that the whole thing never happened. You'd think that a week after they pulled their story, they might have gotten it together to publish something about the whole sequence.
In this case, the Beeb has chosen to simply make it look like they never did a story which turned out to be...ahem, completely false ([good thing truth is a defense in libel cases, bud -- ed.]). But alas, they're pikers when it comes to yanking documents from their site and pretending the whole thing never happened. For really shameful behavior, go to this site and search it for "Easterbrook" or "Tuesday Morning Quarterback" (then note the sloppy job they did by searching for just plain "quarterback" or "tuesday morning"). What is SC talking about?
Let's start by working backwards. While most people ([when SC says 'people', he means 'magazine-addicted policy wonks' -- ed.]) are familiar with Gregg Easterbrook from his work at the Brookings Institution, and his writings for the Atlantic and The New Republic, he also writes a very offbeat column about the NFL called "Tuesday Morning Quarterback". You can find its present archives here. But wait? Why would the NFL pick up a guy like this to start writing a column for their official website in week 13 of a season? Why not introduce him in the preseason?
Well, before that, Mr. Easterbrook wrote his column for two years for ESPN.com. But then he wrote this admittedly ill-advised column smacking Disney for their complicity in the unrestrained Quentin Tarantino gorefest known as "Kill Bill". There are two reasons why the label "ill-advised" fits: 1) going after your employer is never a smart idea (Disney owns ESPN), and 2) it is very hard not to read the last paragraph as an anti-Semitic diatribe. For the record, SC doesn't believe it was meant as such; nevertheless Mr. Easterbrook wrote a mea culpa shortly thereafter, acknowledging that it could have been done better.
Largely on account of Ill-Advisedness #1, though, Disney simply eradicated all traces that Gregg Easterbrook had ever written anything for ESPN.com. As evidence that ESPN does not customarily remove the work of writers who have ceased to be employed by them, SC submits the case of Jeffrey Denberg; the evidence shows that he stopped writing for them about a year before his death, and yet all of his columns are still accessible. This isn't to say that all of ESPN's ex-columnists are fully archived; a long time ago, they employed L.A. Times soccer columnist Grahame Jones, but he stopped writing for them long before the present iteration of their website, and they lost his columns several redesigns ago. Ditto for New York Daily News basketball columnist Frank Isola.
ESPN.com wasn't actually the first home of Mr. Easterbrook's column; for its first two years, it ran at Slate. Note that they also haven't removed the archives of their former contributor's work.
George Orwell coined the term "memory hole" to refer to the technical apparatus needed to write people out of history (see the second paragraph of this page). At ESPN, Gregg Easterbrook has been put down the memory hole, and the BBC episode that Prof. Liberman wrote about is just one more reminder of how easy computers make the task of deleting history.
Aren't this thing phased out? Never thought they still exist.
Posted by: arizona seo | February 10, 2011 at 12:00 AM