CNN changes history!

I’ve been having a debate with someone in a forum with a very slow turn-around time. It’s a newsletter that’s published once a month, so each cycle of the “discussion” takes two months.

Anyway, she believes the federal response to New Orleans after Katrina was slow – and indeed, slower than to areas which were more likely to have voted for Bush. I disagree.

After going back and forth, I decided I needed to get some references together, and so I started paging back through my favorite blogs to collect links and reports.

I’m still in the “C’s”, and today I looked at Clayton Cramer’s archives. Now, what I examined seems to have focused mainly on the breakdown of social order that happened in the wake of Katrina, and included links to news accounts of some things that turn out not to have happened after all.

One of the links, though, was extremely curious. In Clayton’s blog, as he says:

A couple years ago, during the Katrina disaster, I linked to a CNN report and quoted it:

Overnight, police snipers were stationed on the roof of their precinct, trying to protect it from gunmen roaming through the city, CNN’s Chris Lawrence reported.

One New Orleans police sergeant compared the situation to Somalia and said officers were outnumbered and outgunned by gangs in trucks.

“It’s a war zone, and they’re not treating it like one,” he said, referring to the federal government. …

One of my readers ran into that posting of mine–and noticed that the CNN report at that link no longer said anything like that. It was much, much more upbeat. Nothing about the police snipers on the roof. Did I copy the wrong link? Did I have a brief attack of delusion, and make something up?

Well, some people might have done just that. However, after having read Clayton’s blog for a while, I doubt he’d do that. Furthermore, he included a link. If he had made up the citation that was supposed to be at the other end of that link, he’d have to realize the first person to click through would notice. He’s smarter than that.

Heck, I have a compost pile smarter than that.

Furthermore, as he points out in today’s post:

Nope. Lots of other people linked to that same CNN page, and quoted the same text. Like http://paulsplanet.blogspot.com/2005/09/fall-of-new-orleans_02.htmlhttp://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/002476.html .

There were bloggers who quoted CNN exactly as I did, although with no link to the story: http://knemeyer.com/dk.cfm?a=cms,c,318,1 and http://www.flaregun.org/?feed=rss2&p=51 and http://gutternickle.net/blog/index.php/2005/09/02/something_i_don_t_want_to_forget_about_k

We could assume there was a conspiracy, I suppose. Everyone in it would have to have had the same text to work from, and would have to have agreed to post it, on their blogs, and link to the same article (or include no link at all). And then sit on the truth for a year and a half now.

No, after applying Occam’s Razor, I have to conclude CNN has changed the contents of that file. And in a distinct contrast with standard practice for reputable bloggers, nowhere has the company flagged this as an edit.

Did something go down the memory hole? If that story was inaccurate, they should have identified it as inaccurate, and updated it. This dramatic transformation of a story that played a big part in creating bad press for President Bush really smacks of something very Orwellian.

At 3:00 this afternoon, I found this extremely curious.

I thought Clayton would find it equally so.

By 4:00, after Instapundit had picked up on it, it occurred to me it was pretty darn important.

Folks, this was a link to an archived article. Take a look at the link format:

<http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/02/katrina.impact/index.html>

“cnn.com” is, of course, CNN. Then we have the year, the directory for US news, the month, the date, and then the topic folder name. (Index.html is the default filename for any folder, and is the first file a browser will look for at the end of a URL unless directed otherwise.) This URL has every appearance of a permanent reference, identified with topic and date.

Now, I’m used to clicking on a link and finding that the file has been removed. Those are called “volatile links”. But this is different. This is a file which doesn’t say today what it said yesterday, and there’s no reason given for the change. Somebody saw fit to edit the historical record without comment, and without notice.

Frankly, if CNN did this to one archived story, how many others have been similarly adjusted? If we look into the archives at CNN, are we getting an accurate picture of CNN’s coverage of events, or are we seeing how CNN wishes it had covered them?

Folks, this one’s big. If we can’t trust CNN to be honest about what it’s reported in the past, what does it say about what they’re covering now, or may cover in the future?

For the sake of completeness, here’s what I wrote, in a bit of a hurry, at 4 PM today.

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