Sunday Times: Pay Up To Have Us Tell You How We Were Totally Wrong In Our Climate Change Story
from the that's-worth-paying-for? dept
Now that Rupert Murdoch has put up his paywalls around The Times of London and the Sunday Times, it's creating some interesting moral and journalistic dilemmas. Earlier this year, apparently the Sunday Times ran a highly publicized report claiming that climate change scientists had made predictions about rainforest threats from climate change that were based on bogus information. Unfortunately, it turns out that that the bogus part was actually in the coverage by The Times, and not the researchers. Months later, The Times has issued a massive retraction. While the Sunday Times has simply disappeared the original article from the web (article? what article?), the retraction is behind the paywall. This is leading some to question the journalistic ethics here. If you put out a huge, publicly-accessible, fear-mongering report that accuses researchers of relying on junk science... and it turns out to be totally wrong, doesn't there seem to be something wrong about then putting the retraction behind a paywall? I recognize that the Sunday Times' strategy is for all of its content to be paywalled, but there are times when you make an exception. This seems like an important one.
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Filed Under: corrections, journalism, paywalls, retractions
Companies: news corp., the times
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sort of reads like "gotchya" again, trying to slam the model not by addressing the model, but by focusing on a small, relatively minor issue. it is the type of thing that would come up in any changeover of this nature.
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A relatively minor issue would be for Sunday Times to leave retractions for public articles concerning boring errata behind a paywall.
A major CLUSTERFRAK issue is when Sunday Times publishes a wholly fabricated and intentionally deceitful , publicall available article, and then hide the retraction behind a paywall.
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"This is leading some to question..."
- and -
"I recognize that the Sunday Times' strategy is for all of its content to be paywalled, but there are times when you make an exception. This seems like an important one."
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You're suggesting that the editorial board/staff isn't aware that their own website is behind a paywall? Odd....
"sort of reads like "gotchya" again, trying to slam the model not by addressing the model, but by focusing on a small, relatively minor issue."
Uh, no, it's an ethics question, as stated in the story. Public lies vs. paywalled retraction. How are you not getting this?
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Uh, no, it's an ethics question, as stated in the story. Public lies vs. paywalled retraction. How are you not getting this?"
Because Mike can do no right, and TAM must stretch and twist any statement to try to "get" Mike and the site. After all, TAM is right, and everyone else is wrong, at least in TAMWorld(tm).
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So then you admit that the model has problems. and who are you to judge the significance of this issue? There seems to be many many significant issues with this model, not just this one and you would rather that no one discuss any issues and pretend that there is nothing wrong with the model. If it's such a minor issue then why are you so worried about us discussing it? It's apparently significant enough for you to comment on.
and Mike never said that this issue is the only reason why paywalls are a bad model or that this issue even makes a significant negative contribution to the problems with paywall. He is merely pointing out that this is an issue, for you to take that as saying that he is focusing on this issue by merely mentioning it and implying that the entire model has been debunked based on this issue is not what Mike is doing at all.
"trying to slam the model not by addressing the model"
How is discussing problems with the model not addressing the model? What, should we criticize the model by finding positive things about it?
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but hey, as a plus, you didnt call me a racist yet.
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NOW! ;-)
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Yes, of course TAM would leap to be the apologist for Big Media and brush this off as nothing more than "a simple glitch", while completely and utterly missing the underlying principle and ethics of such a "glitch." This wasnt accidental TAM, this wasnt an example of "Well, they just didnt notice." They knew EXACTLY what they were doing when the put the big attention-grabbing FALSE headline and story on the public page, and the retraction and admission of FRAUD only behind the paywall.
And you arent a racist, you are a Techist. A bigot against technology. And you are a bigot against the public good, also known as a "Publicist."
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Global warming is happening
-vs-
Global warming is hype
yeah relatively minor issue ...
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makes sense
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and this is one of the problems with copy protection laws. If someone sends me a newspaper I can keep it and use it as future evidence against future denials. But if I'm not allowed to copy a webpage and someone later takes down the web page they can deny ever having said anything.
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"This is just a technological upgrade to putting the breaking headline on the frontpage, finding out its bogus, then putting [an address to send money for] the retraction on page 19/A a month later after the initial heat has cooled off."
TFTFY
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Before newspapers fulfilled that obligation by burying the retraction in a future issue (after the masses of their readership have hopefully forgotten the initial heat). Well now with the news online they can fulfill that obligation and bury it behind a paywall. That way if someone did try to claim they didn't retract it the they just point to the paywall, throw their hands up, and say, "There's the retraction. Its not our fault if people don't want to pay for the access to read it."
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So...
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Turn the scenario around and listen to the howls
You'd need earplugs to dampen the screams of outrage from the anti-science crowd.
The reason you don't hear many screams now is that the pro-science folks are getting pretty used to taking it up the butt on the corporate media stage. Most of Murdoch's outlets (and I mean that in the sewer sense of the word) are in denial mode when it comes to climate science. Seems like they're just taking advantage of the rules they establish for "ethics".
The Wall Street Journal is so anti-science when it comes to climate they'd probably ignore the whole thing and not print any sort of retraction anyway. I know they also either carried the article or quoted from it. Anyone know what they did about the retraction?
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Irrelevant
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One could debate whether the tree fell
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If you could sue for...
(I know, I know, special level of hell reserved etc. etc. etc. At least I left out the thalidomide jokes)
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Techdirt article edits
When Mike (or others) make an edit to articles there is no trace of what the original content was. Not saying that Techdirt is doing anything underhanded but I would like to see the original content with a strikethrough and the edited content following. Given Techdirts position on a number of topics and its userbase, I think this change could only enhance its credibility.
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Huh? That's exactly what we do. The only time we don't do that is in cases where we fix typos.
If we edit actual content, we always do a strikethrough. Here's are some examples:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100615/1521059835.shtml
http://www.techdirt.com/art icles/20100405/1818058887.shtml
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100308/0123168455.shtml
So, not sure what your complaint is? We've *always* done things this way.
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