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Got a comment? Make it here. RELATED: Lying about a story about lying liars; in other news, Ann Coulter
just gave birth to Al Franken's love child
Within the article redux, the paper admits that there were serious errors in the originally published version. Additionally, there is this curious disclaimer: "This story was overwritten during an import procedure around 8 a.m. Tuesday morning. This is a duplicate of the story." It's an interesting explanation, albeit one with three provable falsehoods in those two sentences. While what the paper is stating, both within the original article and in the newspaper's explanation of how it disappeared from the web, is demonstrably untrue in a number of ways, it all leads to yet more very serious questions about the newspaper's integrity in a series of pieces aimed at questioning the integrity of Mayor Ed Martin. As ironic as it sounds, the paper is now involved in its own cover-up with this whitewashed tale of how they are uncovering what they allege to be a cover-up at Venice City Hall. I would normally find these types of shenanigans hilarious, but the stakes are so high for both the citizens and the city government. In the process of printing, retracting, and reprinting a controversial story that Venice Florida! dot com has already shown to be highly erroneous, the paper has touched off a bloody civil war within Venice, one that was simmering darkly in the cold confines of back office conspiratorial conversations and that has now blown out into wide open public hostility. It's a war that is now declared open -- take no prisoners, rape anything that moves and then slit its throat -- this open declaration is thanks to an ill-timed and idiotic email from (a quite likely inebriated) Councilman Rick Tacy that point-blank accused Martin and Councilwoman Sue Lang of violating Florida's Government in the Sunshine laws.
Falsehood Number 1: "This story was overwritten..." One obvious question: if the page was overwritten, how is it that the reader's comment stayed in place? That can be explained by the fact that the story was in one text file, the reader comment in another, and the page pulls these two separate files simultaneously and throws them onto your browser screen when you do a page pull from their server. That in turn, though, begs the real question: where is the text file that overwrote the original story? The code that the page is throwing out is stating that it can't find the text file -- it's missing. Where is the new text file that the Herald-Trib states overwrote the old one? Was that overwritten as well? Call me wacky, cuz it sure looks to me like the server is saying that whatever file name that the server is looking for, a file with that file name has been deleted as it no longer exists on their server: "The article requested can not be found! Please refresh your browser or go back. (SH,20080429,NEWS,804290302,AR)." I saw the page when it collapsed (fuller explanation of this a little later on in this story) -- there was no new text file inserted. It went straight from the text being there to the text file being non-locatable. That's caused by a deletion, not by a replacement. When the deleted/overwritten article was finally republished on a different web page (as we'll see below), it was in a heavily edited and much shorter version. Arguing that the text file was accidentally overwritten boggles the mind in this context and stretches credulity when combined with the other falsehoods in Herald-Trib's disclaimer as provable below. The Herald-Trib is lying. There is no polite way to say it.
Falsehood Number 2: "This is a duplicate of
the story." According to
Webster's online
definition of "duplicate," the word, as a noun, has following meaning: "a
copy exactly like an original; anything corresponding
in all respects to something else." As a verb, its
definition is "to make an exact copy of." When
used as an adjective, the word is defined as " What the Herald-Tribune republished claiming to be a duplicate is anything but a duplicate. The republished "duplicate" article was a much shorter, expurgated version of the original, shorter almost by half. Here's the republished, so-called duplicate version. Here is the original version from April 29 as recorded by Google and
saved by Venice Florida! dot com. The two stories aren't even close, either in length or in overall content. Examination and comparison of the two texts clearly shows that not only was the second version heavily expurgated, but that the story was re-edited as well. To demonstrate further, here is the full text from the two so-called duplicate versions, side by side, in Word format transferred over to a PDF file. The column on the left all through the document is the original text, the column on the right is the so-called identical republished text. This is where it becomes painfully obvious that the two articles are not even close to being identical, either in length or in content. So, again, the Herald-Trib is lying. There is no polite way to say it.
Falsehood Number 3: "...was overwritten during
an import procedure around 8 a.m. Tuesday morning." Don't trust my memory? Alright. How about Google's? Look again at Google's cached copy of the original article, only pay attention to the very
tiny top line of Google's inserted text. Google notes that they recorded their cached version at "29
Apr 2008 22:17:29 GMT,"
which would be 3:17 AM EST on April 30 ( Or to put more simply, Google spidered and recorded the page with text still intact some 19 hours after the Herald-Trib claims that the text on the page was accidentally deleted by an import procedure. Maybe the Herald-Trib did an import procedure at around 8 A.M. on Tuesday morning, as they claim, but one thing is clear: that procedure didn't wipe out the text as the Herald-Trib is claiming. Something else did. So far, the Herald-Trib isn't saying what that something else is.
Blink By purely odd and strange coincidence, the story was taken down a couple of hours after I published an article in response, an article that took great pains to show how the original article was false in numerous respects. I even made a chart that went paragraph by paragraph. I included video. It was a major pain in the ass to put together, but after a lot of editing and layout alterations, I thought it turned out to be not too shabby. Odd that the Herald-Trib's article was pulled after several hours my article was published. You don't think... naaaaahhhh..... Out of their whole site, they accidentally overwrote only one article, one that they were possibly worried about as it might land them in the land of Libel. By accident. Overwritten. Not deleted. Gee, what are the odds?
WTF? This is the NYT? Good thing Pinocchio is a fairy tale, otherwise they'd be knocking their desk lamps and computer monitors all over the place in their offices. Just exactly how stupid does the Herald-Trib think we are? Did they think nobody would notice? "Ah, just tell them it was deleted, nobody saved a copy, probably." With this cover up within their publication over a botched article about an alleged cover-up at city hall, you would believe them... why? The mind boggles. Why would the Herald-Trib lie? I'll bet if Mayor Ed Martin gets an attorney, his attorney will have a pretty good theory. Probably similar to the one I've been toying around with in my head.
John Patten is the head of Web Operations for Creative Pages, and has worked in broadcasting for over 12 years. He can also be incredibly rude at times. |
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It just gets funnier and funnier
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