Don't believe this post

Hi. I have edited and re-edited that last post, "The difference between ambling and sauntering," about four times now. Unless there's some psycho working at The Memory Hole (www.thememoryhole.com) --or, as is more likely the case, the FBI--who thinks my words are worth recording for posterity, no one's gonna be the wiser about it. I feel like I'm being sneaky by changing my words; it's the literary equivalent of Photoshop slimming. It's so easy to make these changes, to take advantage of 20/20 hindsight and the "edit post" button to make myself look better, sound smarter. There doesn't seem to be any built-in option with this blog-hosting site to publish brief "errata" announcements. Gee, I suppose I could bracket an in-text editorial comment to indicate to readers when I have changed the word "very" to "VERY," but that would break the flow of my prose, wouldn't it?

This experience gives me the opportunity to reflect briefly on the boons and pitfalls of digital-age journalism. On the one hand, we have unprecedented access to alternative voices, such as those of independent journalist Dahr Jamail in Iraq (www.dahrjamail.com) and Amy Goodman at Democracy Now! (www.democracynow.org). On the other hand, it is easier than ever for the editors and contributors to the bigtime (and smalltime) media--and government agencies at various levels, and just about everyone else out there--to doctor the data they present, or to simply make it disappear when its availability is no longer convenient. There has always been the problem of news stories that never see the light of day; now we also have to deal with the problem of vanishing news. Gone are the days when newspapers publish their mea culpas in the following day's edition; in most cases I've observed, the electronic "news and information" websites just go back and edit or erase the offending material. Of course, it's not just errors they're fixing (perhaps after feeding a lie to untold thousands of readers); they're also erasing important stuff that may not gibe with the White House's media message of the week.

I think that in addition to this back-end problem of instant revisionism, we've worsened a front-end problem of laziness or sloppiness in reporting. There's an unprecedented volume of information out there, and I'd wager there's a corresponding, growing proportion of that information that's crap. As in, "Ah, we can always fix it later, so let's publish this now even though it's full of crap." And the ease of access to this crap lends itself to its own rapid reproduction, with sometimes deadly effect: in poorly-researched master's theses, in State Department briefings used to justify "preventive wars"; from there to the various outlets of the Fox News division, to Ann Coulter/The Borg, and so on.

Thank goodness for all the e-nabled bloggers and media watchdogs out there monitoring and mirroring the big websites and keeping important information from falling, at a keystroke, into oblivion. At the same time, I think it would be well to for us to think individually and collectively about how both big-industry and cottage-industry journalists--and consumers, too--ought to handle these exquisitely manipulable words. Is there a politically feasible way of demanding greater disclosure from media sources? (Online memory being ever cheaper and more abundant, I really don't see any technical hurdles that couldn't be overcome. Hell, one company--Walmart--stores twice as much consumer-related data on its mainframe computers as all the information that currently exists on the world wide web.) I would like to see the development and implementation of a standard wherein media and government information websites would provide links to earlier drafts of their content. Prolly (hopefully) this question is being bounced around in college journalism classes, but I sure don't see that reflected in mainstream media and government practices so far.

The efficacy of whatever standards we develop will be limited by the degree of cynicism of the shapers and purveyors of our news, but something is better than nothing. I vote we begin demanding greater accountability, right away. I will start with myself: I promise not to erase my posts (at least as long as I am maintaining this account), and I promise to keep some sort of accounting of any future edits I make to my posts. Call me on it if you catch me doing otherwise, and (please) demand the same accountability from the other websites you frequent.

I welcome your thoughts and suggestions.