The ‘Mysterious\' Disappearance of a Quotation Has a Mundane Explanation

Was a quote about a pro-Israel group mysteriously scrubbed from a New York Times story? A number of online commenters, in blog posts and on Twitter, wrote Tuesday that a quote calling the American Israel Public Affairs Committee “the 800-pound gorilla in the room” had been taken out of an article without explanation, suggesting that The Times was responding to political pressure. On the face of it, it sounds mighty bad.

However, that's not really what happened. I'll explain, but first I will say up front that I'm not an apologist for The Times on this issue. I've written critically at least twice about instances when The Times, in my opinion, did not follow ideal transparency practices in making changes to articles, then archiving those articles. One had to do with a critique of Mitt Romney; another with Iran and nuclear weapons. In both cases, I concluded that The Times should have handled story revisions in a way that provided more clarity for the reader.

What happened here, though, seems quite different to me. On a moving story about President Obama and Syria, some information that appeared in a Sunday-to-Monday story (that is, an article that started online on Sunday and appeared on Monday's front page) was carried over to a new, Monday-to-Tuesday front page story.

That new story was, appropriately, assigned a new URL, assuring that it would be archived separately. Once new information came along, a great deal of old information, including the Aipac quote, was replaced.

But the quotation remains in the earlier article, which you can see here, and is archived accordingly. It also appeared in print Monday.

It is reasonable enough that the quotation was not repeated in the article that appeared in Tuesday's paper. For a while on Monday, the new story online included information from the previous day's article. It was, essentially, what old-school journalists call “b-matter” - background information that is not new and that may well be replaced when new information comes along.

New information did come along: Mr. Obama got the support of Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and that development dominated the new story.

Was political pressure brought to bear on The Times for the Aipac quotation, as some have suggested? “None whatsoever,” said David Leonhardt, the Washington bureau chief. He added, “Aipac remains a newsworthy part of this story, and you'll see more about that soon.”

When compared on News Sniffer, an organization that keeps various versions of news articles, two versions of the Monday-to-Tuesday article look very different, and News Sniffer says that 11 versions may be seen. The early versions are, in some ways, rewrites of the previous day's article; the later ones contain a great deal of new information.

Should The Times archive many versions of each moving story? Some people think so, but Philip B. Corbett, the associate managing editor for standards, told me that would be impractical and confusing. I'm inclined to agree.

“It makes sense to archive one version for each news cycle, not 16 different versions,” he said, and to make the archived version the most heavily edited and refined one, which usually corresponds with the version that runs in print. A vast majority of readers, he said, “would only be lost and confused” if they tried to look up an article and found multiple versions, each slightly different.

The Times does not provide an editor's note for every revision, although it does append corrections if a version included a factual error. Given the number of changes - new reporting, different headlines, more complete editing, etc. - that may come along in the course of a single news cycle, an editor's note discussing each one would become absurd. If the meaning changes, as I believe it did in the Iran article I mentioned above, that ought to be explained. If, during a single news cycle, an article changes significantly, as in the Romney example above, a new article and new URL should be assigned.

Mr. Corbett said The Times's “standard approach” was more a practice than a firm policy. “It's something that we are always looking at,” he said.

Should The Times be more transparent, in some cases, about the changes it makes to stories? No doubt. But in this instance, the less exciting explanation is the right one.