Tuesday, January 9, 2018

PolitiFact Texas unpublished (Updated)

It seems like only yesterday we were praising PolitiFact Texas and W. Gardner Selby for taking an important step toward full transparency by making its interviews of experts available to readers.

Now it has come to our attention that PolitiFact Texas has followed PolitiFact National's lead in unpublishing stories when it decides they are defective.

A publisher may have legitimate reasons for unpublishing a story. But in the interest of transparency organizations should not totally remove the defective work from public view. Organizations should archive the story and keep it available before and after the organization puts the needed changes into effect.

Lately PolitiFact disappears the entire story and only posts a link to the archived version after republishing a reworked version.

If there's a good excuse for that doughnut hole in transparency we are not aware of it.


We also disapprove of PolitiFact only communicating its decision to unpublish the item on Twitter. That's transparency only for the Twitterverse. Readers deserve better than that.



Update Jan. 10, 2018

We found what is apparently the original version of the Abbott-O-Meter ruling and archived it at the Internet Archive.

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