Stealth edits: only if no one's watching
A journalist working for Radio New Zealand has been caught out editing articles to make them favourable to Russia. The media outlet's chief executive has condemned the changes as pro-Kremlin garbage
, describing his reaction to the incident: It is so disappointing. I'm gutted. It's painful. It's shocking
. I think he's quite upset, just reading between the lines.
The affected articles have now been corrected, with editory clarifications.
The journalist in question claims to have been editing news agency copy published on the RNZ website for years. A statement on RNZ - which is state-owned - said after uncovering issues in the 16 stories, they had now been republished with corrections and editor's notes.
Ben Morris, BBC News
Editor's notes? That's gotta sound frighteningly transparent to a BBC editor.
While stealth editing of published articles is quite the done thing at MostTrustedInternationalNewsBroadcaster Towers, it's only ever in compliance with the directives laid down by the republic's politburo. Fortunately, we have the world's most trusted international news broadcaster
™'s accountability coach, the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, at least for now. Although even that cannot help us when the politburo's policies are enacted pre-publication.