If breitbart did it, it would be selective editing and there would be the usual calls for his head.

The time does it without notation and it's an acceptable journalism practice.

The more they consider themselves exempt from the rules, the more the old gray lady sinks into irrelevance.

Now I understand. Mr. Peters didn't scrub, I mean revise, the article because he realized Ms. Abramson's comments were insensitive - which would have been a good thing - but because of standard updating, revising and condensing procedures. I thought there was at least one liberal at the NYT who recognized that it was inappropriate to compare a newspaper to the Holy Bible. Apparently not.

Jay;

You are being a wimp. If you want to say something, go ahead and say it. Stand up for yourself, man.

“In my house growing up, The Times substituted for religion. If The Times said it, it was the absolute truth.”

Until they deleted it.

We have always been at war with Eurasia.

So, it's okay because they left up the comments remarking on a now-nonexistent quote? Somehow that doesn't seem to make it better.

Why not just post an entirely new story? The Times' antiquated deference to print just seems a bit bizarre in this century.

What the reporter describes is standard procedure at basically any newspaper with a website. I work at a local paper, not the paper of record for anyone, and we constantly rush to put up early web copy, then replace it in the afternoon with the version that runs in the dead tree. It's often confusing and always inefficient, but that's how these organizations try to straddle the gap between their unfashionable print operation and their unprofitable web operation.

Yeah, you're post was light hearted. It also exposed your ignorance of how newspapers actually work, despite your inclination to pretentiously compare them to religions and imagine they're engaged in some conspiracy against the public.

The thing political bloggers constantly misunderstand about reporters is that unlike the former, the latter did not go into journalism in order to misinform their readers in service to their ideology.

Dear Redfate -

"It's often confusing and always inefficient, but that's how these organizations try to straddle the gap between their unfashionable print operation and their unprofitable web operation."

So your standard procedures are confusing and inefficient, unfashionable and unprofitable? Were you trying to make Mr. Nordlinger's point for him?

You have truly exposed some ignorance and pretentiousness. Kudos.

redfate, Perhaps the fact that your paper is "unfashionable" and its associated web presence is "unprofitable" might be somehow related to its "inefficient" practice of disseminating information in a "confusing" way.

Oh, and "reporters ... did not go into journalism in order to misinform their readers in service to their ideology."?

Here's a study that says otherwise, there are plenty more where this came from: External Link 

Key takeaway, "As you might expect, most of the respondents cited “a desire to change the world in some way” as their motivation for engaging in journalism."

And then there's this, which seems eerily appropriate to Jay's point:
"News is what someone wants suppressed. Everything else is advertising. The power is to set the agenda. What we print and what we don’t print matter a lot.”
– Katharine Graham

@ redfate

I went to J-school, spent most my professional life in journalism, and the last paragraph in your comment is a farce.

Did the NYT tell everyone yesterday that they were using old quotes? Of course not. In the grand scheme of things, does refreshing with new quotes matter? No. I've "refreshed" myself, except that everywhere I've worked, which has not included the NYT, has slapped on a word such as "UPDATED" followed by the time and date. Before the internet, the only way a reader could tell what was altered was to compare editions.

The missing quotes were the only vivid words in a boring story. Why remove them? If I were "refreshing" I would have I would have insisted they remain, even try to ask Jill Abramson about it, if possible.

Maybe the NYT didn't have second thoughts about erasing the quotes, maybe they did. But because the paper of record has such a dismal record for reporting, fudging, misleading and (rarely, thankfully) lying that it's hard to know what's really going on in that newsroom.

I noticed they did keep "ascending to Valhalla" and I wonder if Abramson really knows what Valhalla really was? It's not comparable to heaven. It was a great hall built by Odin to house the most elite soldiers who'd died in battle, and who would fight on the gods' behalf. They would spend all day and night drinking, eating and practicing fighting. If they died in practice they would be brought back to life (as it were). This is all they did. And the reason Odin built Valhalla was because prohecy said the Norse gods were doomed in something akin to the Rapture, so they may as well go out with a bang.

Cheers, Jill.