New Problems For Greg Mitchell Of E&P

Important Note: As Google has now apparently begun to recrawl E&P, some sentences in Mitchell's piece which were not initially archived are beginning to appear. However, in many instances you'll also note that they are frequently archived at top on sites other than E&P. That suggests those sites were crawled prior to the altered E&P text. Also screencaps, below and at Hot Air document that Mitchell's content was obviously altered after publication. My latest on Mitchell is here.

Allah posts on Editor and Publisher Editor Greg Mitchell's current troubles regarding revising a three year old story. He also discovers a possible new case of revisionism but feels he can't prove it. I think I found a way which will work.

Allah suggests Mitchell added two paragraphs to a story post-publication and failed to acknowledge it. The two middle paragraphs below are those. I added the ones above and below for a reason.

Each line of text below is a hyperlink to a Google advanced search looking for that particular sentence. By clicking through the links, you'll see that Google captured the lines above and below the paragraphs in question, but not those paragraphs. In essence, it means when Google crawled and indexed the page originally, they weren't there.

But, in general, the serious charges and wacky conspiracy theories against the photographers, and their news organizations, are largely unfounded, and politically driven, while at times raising valid questions, such as what represents "staging."

Since my first column, the same blogs are in a tizzy over the "Zombietime" site proving that the July 23 incident, in which two Red Cross ambulances were hit from the air by the Israelis, never happened. Needless to say, there is no such proof, and my favorite line comes near the end when the writer observes "Israel already admitted to carrying out the attack," adding dryly that this is "an interesting point."

Does this stop her? Alas, no. She goes on to assert that "all signs" point to a "clumsy hoax," complete with ambulances towed from a junk yard and "Red Cross workers feigning minor injuries." Perhaps the Israeli missiles were fired from the Grassy Knoll.

In that previous column (which one rightwing blog, with exquisite hypocrisy, labled a "cheap smear"), I briefly mentioned the uproar over comments made by a 23-year-old freelancer in Beirut named Bryan Denton, posted at Lightstalkers.org, a prime site for photojournalists. Denton has placed half a dozen pictures in The New York Times this summer, which would normally discredit him as a source for the rightwing bloggers, since so many of them feel that paper frequently collaborates with Hezbollah in its photo propaganda. But in this case they liked what he'd written, at least initially.

Update: Allah had some concerns that not every line outside the two graphs came up as one might expect given my approach. I suggested that was because Mitchell had altered additional text. I have made a screen cap proving that to be the case. Above, 4th line last graph, you'll see that Mitchell wrote "Denton has placed half a dozen." That's how his entry reads today. Below via Google, you'll see he cleaned up other items as well when he added the graphs. It once read "Denton has placed about half a dozen."

Update: I've discovered additional changes supported by screen caps, but it's redundant at this point so I'm saving the bandwidth. Mitchell altered a sentence "I introduced the uproar over comments made by a young" to read "I briefly mentioned the uproar over comments made by a 23-year-old freelancer."

Obviously, Mitchell re-writes, or edits his material without citing changes.

Comments

[Niko]

Actually, the Google search for the middle part _does_ yield the same hits.

What you might not know about Google is that it allows for almost instant manual updates of their index by site owners, i.e. if you're the administrator of a specific site you can manually trigger the so-called "googlebot" (the Google application that retrieves and indexes your web pages) to re-index a specific URL even when the normal schedule for a re-index were days ahead.

http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/

I guess this is what "happened" here. It's the same technique that Markos "Screw Them" Zuniga used back then to hide traces of his smear.

[Stevesh]

A new term for the ColumbiaJournoSchool/Web Dictionary, ala: "frisched?"

Perhaps: A "mitchell?" I prefer - caught doing a "greggie."

[Pablo]

Meet your new overlords, Greg. :-)

[Quilly Mammoth]

Have any bloggers copied portions of those paragraphs to their posts on this issue when this first came out? I didn't, but maybe others have.

[w3]

Wayback either allows a site admin to force a crawl or it is simply geting the live version of the page because I now understand that although it claims to be an archive of the web it does not actually archive all changes as they happen. The 2004 pages are simply redirects to what is there now, not what they were in 2004. The URL timestamps prove this.

[CottShop]

Well let's hope Greg keeps a yappin- the more he talks the deeper he steps in the stinky stuff- good work Dan

[BfC]

Well, now the article says something else again. Does not admit the first edit, and mistates this edit/correction and add additional "information" as to internship:

CORRECTION, August 27, 2006: Several readers of the 2003 story below have informed us that the water flowing over Niagara Falls was turned off in June 1969, not in 1967, as the article below stated. We have corrected or deleted that date and Mitchell’s age where they appeared in this column. Mitchell worked at the Gazette in the summers of 1968 and 1969 before graduating from college in 1970. The incident recounted below occurred in his second summer at the paper, not in the first, as the original had it.

****

Since the press seems to be in full-disclosure mode these days, I want to finally come clean. Back when I worked for the Niagara Falls (N.Y.) Gazette (now the Niagara Gazette) as a summer intern, our city editor asked me to find out what tourists thought about an amazing local event: Engineers had literally "turned off" the famous cataracts, diverting water so they could shore up the crumbling rock face. Were visitors disappointed to find a trickle rather than a roar? Or thrilled about witnessing this once-in-a-lifetime stunt?