And Down The Memory Hole We Go. Again.

Once again, the Post has erased the record of its original reporting, making accountability difficult if not impossible. Except by chance, as happened today.

Need I say that changing records without consequences is a practice it uniquely permits itself? I do.

As I sit here very late Tuesday evening, washingtonpost.com shows a front-page story for Wednesday with the hed Senate Presses For Concrete Steps Toward Troop Withdrawal For Iraq by Shailagh Murray and Jonathan Weisman about yesterday's Senate vote. To be specific, about yesterday's Senate vote blogged here. In that post, I make fun of Murray and Weisman as "excitable reporters" for having written a story filed for washingtonpost.com with the headline Senate Rebukes Bush On Iraq War Policy. But if you click on the link for that story, you won't find it--it's been replaced by their more sober account on Wednesday's front page. Most of the rebuking that's going on appears to have been transferred into a "rebuff" as described in an "analysis" by Dan Balz.

Could they give President Bush a few do-overs like that one? Okay, maybe not Iraq, but say his attempt to reform Social Security? Never happened.

It's nice to see Murray and Weisman calmed down a bit. You can decide for yourself how much because I happened to quote the first six grafs of the story in my post yesterday (again, here). Otherwise, anyone approaching that post without knowing of the replacement might think I, or any of the other dozens of blogs linking to the original version, just made it all up.

This has happened several times before that I know of. The first was with a Richard Morin story, blogged here in late June, when Morin told me it was a mistake and that the original account in that case (an early teaser on a Post/ABC poll) was supposed to remain attached to the original link. Great, I thought, that unique-url-thingy is kind of what got the whole World Wide Web bonanza going.

Since then, however, I've seen it happen again, and Morin, a busy man for sure, stopped answering my queries about that or anything else a long time ago. So I report, you decide, and who knows whether my link to what appears to be the Wednesday A1 story will even be there when I wake up.

Comments

[Christopher Fotos]

Greetings, PostWatchers. Typepad has once again collapsed. As soon as the system allows me to post, I'll post.