Reply #14: The Archives can disappear, too. Particularly the on-line ones

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While this particular story was reported widely enough and recently enough that the archives are relatively intact, that isn't always the case. I routinely see examples that are rather unsettling. For most purposes, if you can't find an article using the various search engines, the article doesn't exist for you. Same when that article you carefully bookmarked now reports a non-existent page.

The first of many problems involves cases where the online version is changed or even removed from the archives, as if it never existed or never contained important content. Search engines drop the altered or missing pages from their archive index. Like magic, you have The Memory Hole. (Remember that print and online versions of the same article can vary greatly.)

Often, online newspaper and journal archives are available only on a fee paid basis, either from the original publisher or increasingly through agregators who control access to the articles in hundreds or even thousands of research and news publications. Like the search engines, these restrictive archives become valuable assets for limiting the flow of information.

With the small number of choke points in the access paths to news and archives, it is relatively easy to use the same techniques to subvert them as are used by those pushing malware to "take over" hot stories, to make valid sites be banned for "duplicate content" although they are the original source, or to poison cache and keywords to hide alternative information.

At DU, we have watched with disappointment as "important" news stories are almost completely ignored by the MSM and are relegated to "fringe" web sites on the net. We need to be aware that just because Google News archive fails to find a story does not mean the story never existed.