We know from experience that the Bush and Blair administrations are revisionists par excellence: they’re so good at it they change history as they go along – and in some instances they’ve even written it beforehand.
We also know from experience that the corporate news media retrospectively edits its news stories. That’s fair enough when it involves a factuial error, but often it’s done to adjust the spin.
Newsniffer was created by Yorkshireman John Leach to detect revisions and bias in online journalism using a clever combination of backend database wizardry, RSS feeds, and WordPress. Now that’s what I call useful – given the caveat that it remains an accessible public tool, and doesn’t become a private political weapon to ensure doctrinaire conformity.
Newssniffer’s currently monitoring BBC Have Your Say and Guardian Comment Is Free threads for censored comments and any bias that that might represent, but it’s also has proving very effective in detecting revisions of BBC News reports.
Yes, it’s limited in scope at the moment, but it looks like something that could could be expanded given sufficient resources. The big issue, in my opinion, is ensuring that no bias creeps in as to which media outlets are targeted – if it’s not even-handed, it’s pointless.
That said, imagine how handy it would be to be able to track every revision of reports by, for example, the NYT, WaPo, CNN or Fox, or the press releases put out by the various government departments, lobbying firms and PR companies. There’s lots of things an activist could do with this info, all of which would tend to keep the fourth estate a little more honest, a quality which as a whole they seem to be sadly lacking at the moment.
UPDATE: In the interest of full disclosure: I do revise my posts after posting, because I usually spot at least 3, and usually more, glaring spelling or grammatical errors. Sometimes I edit because what I wrote comes across as clunky and lacks mellifluosity. What I don’t and won’t do, unlike some, is to change the story retrospectively.
