Greg Mitchell Must Resign

Update 2: Evidently Mitchell didn't even get the year correct in his original report. That's accuracy for you.

Update: Mitchell had acknowledged his age twice in the previous version of the article and also stated it was a summer internship. Those items are in paragraphs five and six and have not changed. What he did was move it into the lede. You can see that in the old and new versions.

Still, I felt bad about it for years and (obviously) have never forgotten it. On the other hand, I was, at the time, just 19, it was a summer internship, and I'd only been on the job about a month.

One of the many alarming things about the Jayson Blair scandal is that he never grew up, and no one at The New York Times ever seemed to notice. My ethical breach at 19 in Niagara Falls was bad enough. One expects a bit more from a 27-year-old with years of experience in New York.

Bob at Confederate Yankee has the full story around this piece written by Editor and Publisher Editor Greg Mitchell, published on May 20, 2003. Obviously at some point yesterday, Mitchell went back in and edited his old work in an attempt to minimize fall out from the unethical reporting practices he acknowledges in the article.

Talk about it being the cover up and not the crime. There is no way Mitchell can continue in his position now after this additional outrageous breech of ethics.

While the article is not formally cached by Google, the old version still appears through the search engine. I have two screen caps below demonstrating the two versions of the article. Note that Mitchell added "Back in 1967, when I was 19." But you definitely want to visit Bob to read the whole story, as you'll see the "summer intern" claim was added as well. Click the top image if you need to enlarge.

Owens updates the full story here on his blog. Ed Driscoll has discovered that the unaltered version of the story is available through the Wayback Machine.

Comments

[Confederate Yankee]

Dan, the original text was captured by the Internet Archive (h/t/ Ed Driscoll), and I have now now linked to that.

[gultig]

It just gets worse. An LGF commenter noticed that Niagra Falls was shut off in 1969, not 1967. Which makes him 21, I guess.

[w3]

CY,

Someone is in serious CYA mode because the Wayback archive results now suggest that the edits took place between November 2003 and January 2004. I read the comment by Lewis on your site and looked at the Wayback FAQ to see what I could find about the date stamp in every URL at Wayback.

Wayback states:

How did I end up on the live version of a site? or I clicked on X date, but now I am on Y date, how is that possible?

Not every date for every site archived is 100% complete. When you are surfing an incomplete archived site the Wayback Machine will grab the closest available date to the one you are in for the links that are missing. In the event that we do not have the link archived at all, the Wayback Machine will look for the link on the live web and grab it if available. Pay attention to the date code embedded in the archived url. This is the list of numbers in the middle; it translates as yyyymmddhhmmss. For example in this url http://web.archive.org/web/20000229123340/http://www.yahoo.com/ the date the site was crawled was Feb 29, 2000 at 12:33 and 40 seconds.

As noted by Lewis over at CY, the closest date to the 2004 versions resolves to a URL that indicates mediainfo was archived today.

[The Monster]

More importantly, if you go to the Wayback history page:http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.mediainfo.com/editorandpublisher/headlines/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1891030

you'll note two '2004' edits, one saying 'Jan 17, 2004', and the other saying 'Nov 28, 2004'. When you click on each of those, you'll note that the pages actually returned show those MMDDYYHHMMSS stamps mere minutes apart:

Jan 17, 2004 -> 2006-08-26 23:07:07
Nov 28, 2004 -> 2006-08-26 22:56:52

The allegedly older of these two pages was crawled by the Wayback Machine 12 minutes and change AFTER the one that was supposed to be 10 months newer!

Not only did they try to cover their tracks, but they did so in a very clumsy manner. I can see Wayback just not crawling this page for two years, even though they normally will check back every few months. But when the 'newer' one was crawled before the 'older' one, it is proof of backdating.

[w3]

I don't think so, Monster. I think Wayback is pulling the content from the actual site. Look at their FAQ regarding what they do if they have crawled a site and noted a change on a particular date, but do not archive the page that has changed.

I think what you're seeing in the URL is the timestamp of when you surfed the page.

At least, that's how I understand the mechanism to work according to the FAQ. Wayback either pulls the most recent archive they have or a live version.