In the dystopian novel 1984, our protagonist Winston Smith gets the order to rewrite an article that showed Big Brother had commended a person who was now in the Party’s disfavor: “reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling.” For Winston in Airstrip One, that means actually burning the record of the Times newspaper in the fiery furnace of the memory hole, and producing a forgery of the past. Smith was daily saving the honor of the unchallengeable ruler: Big Brother.
With the Internet, there is no paper trail to burn. There is just code to update. And this has presented a kind of fait accompli for journalistic ethics. The past used to be there in embarrassing paper — eventually turning yellow and converted into microfiche. Journalistic errors existed, and were acknowledged. The disposability of the medium made the mistakes less embarrassing overall, and the archivability of the medium made the public record easier to determine.
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