A while back, Orin Kerr from The Volokh Conspiracy posted a story about how the Census Bureau provided the Department of Homeland Security with profiling information on Arabs. The New York Times and Reuters implied that this was a disturbing privacy intrusion, without mentioning that the data is publicly available, and that anyone can perform such queries themselves if they wish.
It turns out that this information was in the original article, but was removed by an overly aggressive copyeditor, who apparently considered this fact to be unimportant to readers of the Times.
There’s an idea out there that blogs really need editors to do serious journalism, for, among other reasons, fact-checking and accuracy. Those who would rely on blogs for “serious” news are prone to being misled, according to some:
How can we know which blogs are accurate, [and] which are not? Should we depend on a blog of blogs to steer us in the right direction.
Judge for yourselves who was steered in the wrong direction, and who did the steering.