Robert Moynihan, owner of Inside the Vatican magazine, sends out periodic news items in the form of letters from Rome. The following discovery he made concerning news of the investigation and the NY Times caught my attention:
An Odd Deletion?
Then, just a few minutes ago, I received this email from a reader in Tokyo:
“I realized that the sentence ‘A spokeswoman for the Bank of Italy said it been acting under European Union directives’ which is quoted as the last sentence of the New York Times article by you, does not appear in the article as published on the New York Times webpage. How come?”
Hmmm, I thought… How can that be? I clicked on that article myself and copied it into my yesterday’s newsflash…
So, I went back to Rachel Donadio’s story at the New York Times website, at this link: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/22/world/europe/22vatican.html?_r=1
And I rubbed my eyes.
Lo and behold, the last sentence, which was there yesterday when I copied the piece for my newflash — a text you all received — was no longer there.
I then re-read the entire story, and I found that the story had been slightly edited, though the link is exactly the same.
The sentence “A spokeswoman for the Bank of Italy said it been acting under European Union directives” is, in fact, no longer the final sentence of the story.
But the reference to the “European Union directives” has not been deleted altogether.
Here is the relevant phrase, now inserted into an earlier sentence in the story:
“Officials said they had opened the investigation on Monday after the Bank of Italy, adhering to anti-money-laundering directives issued by the European Union, alerted them to two suspicious transfers on Sept. 6 from an account held by the Vatican bank at a Rome branch of Credito Artigiano S.p.A., a bank based in Northern Italy.”
In other words, the final sentence was deleted, and a phrase was added at the spot where the text is bold-faced above.
So, yes, the story as posted today no longer ends with the sentence I quoted yesterday.
But the information is still in the story, more or less.
I note that this is an example of how stories on the internet can shift and change, and even disappear.
You may have noted this yourselves in the past.
So, the internet is a wonderful, very powerful tool.
It is also a very rapidly shifting and sometimes unreliable tool.
It is even a tool that, at some point, could “go down” and no longer be available. (Here is an interesting summary of the current status of the US legislation to give the US President the authority to shut down part or all of the internet in the event of an “emergency”: http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/116839-lawmakers-frustrated-by-internet-qkill-switchq-reports. Note also the first comment at the end of the article.)
This is one more reason for having a printed edition of a publication, where the texts cannot be changed, and where they can be preserved indefinitely — though it is quite expensive to keep a print publication going in the current economic environment.
