On the 25th of February there was a spectacular diary here called "The White House website is getting scrubbed." (original) (diary with four updates) It starts with the claim that a 2003 interview with Dick Cheney by Tim Russert had been removed. Problem is, the interview was never there to begin with.
Updates are not the same as retractions. The author, in four updates concedes that the basis for his diary is undone; the author says:
"So far I've located no evidence that the foregoing interviews were ever linked at the WH website." But this was not in time for it to be linked to all over la Blogosphera.
The guidelines of Daily Kos about conspiracy theories and extraordinary claims is that they have to be backed up by solid proof. By the time of the second update the diary had been linked to by Huffington Post, and included as a source at SourceWatch. It stayed on the rec list for a day with 475 recommends, and nary a commenter asked "where’s the proof?"
To prove that something’s been scrubbed you’ve got to show that it was there to begin with. Screenshots are nice.
Here's an interesting day at whitehouse.gov January 23, 2004:
I emailed the author with 19 points of inaccuracies in his diary, and missing information, but received no answer. I also emailed two front pagers asking "What should I do?" I heard back from one of them it said "correct him at your own risk." I waited six days for the author to print corrections/retractions... nothing.
While waiting around I went to the Jason Leopold page at Wikipedia. The citizen’s encyclopedia for this journalist is remarkable for it’s CAPITAL CLAIMS: cite I went back through the revisions and found that these extraordinary Leopold entries have sat there for more than a month. How long might it take before "White House web site is getting scrubbed?" was corrected or retracted?
It was getting some librarians worried:
Is The White House Scrubbing its Website?
There is a report on the Daily Kos that attempts to document removal of embarrassing materials from the White House website.
• (Updated) The White House website is getting scrubbed by smintheus, Daily Kos, (Sun Feb 25, 2007 at 12:39:00 PM PST)
Some of the post has "proven" facts and other bits are labeled "Speculation." I would be very interested if anyone in the library community can verify or disprove any of the facts or speculations in the article. Also, are there official print resources that document the information that smintheus finds missing at the White House web site? Please let us at FGI know what you find.
If we can't verify or disprove any of this, perhaps we should ask ourselves why we can't. What are we as depository libraries doing if we can't answer what should be a simple straightforward question about who said what, when?
White House redesigns website
Comment:
Thanks to Sabrina I. Pacifici for pointing out that the White House has launched a redesigned website. Is the redesign responsible (intentionally or unintentionally?) for the loss of information? Our questions about verifying or disproving the Daily Kos findings still remain...
By jajacobs at 2007-02-28 20:29
The problems with the diary "White House website is getting scrubbed":
- The author was unaware of the Wayback Internet archive.
- The author was unaware of robots.txt and their uses.
- There is no evidence that the March 16, 2003 interview with Cheney was ever a part of whitehouse.gov – not in the internet archive, and not in external links. There is no evidence that the May 30, 2005 Cheney interview was ever a part of whitehouse.gov. There is no evidence that the September 14, 2003 Cheney interview was ever a part of whitehouse.gov.
- There was no mention in the diary that whitehouse.gov has been completely redesigned, that it took a year to do, that the webmeister responsible is David Almacy, and that he revealed his new design on March 1, 2007. See:White House Cleans Itself Up and also see: Surfing the White House This goes a long way in explaining recent changes to whitehouse.gov organization. cite
- Dead links, removed files. The author claims that:
A final note: While looking to see whether any of the President's more embarrassing speeches had been scrubbed as well, I noticed that the original link to his May 1, 2003 "Mission Accomplished" speech had gone dead. In September 2005 we'd archived that link at the Timeline on the run-up to the Iraq invasion at DowningStreetMemo.com, and we had double-checked to make sure that the link worked properly.
This link is not dead.
- The author uses Brad Blog:
"In the wake of the Vice Presidential debate and the third Presidential debate, in October 2004 Brad Friedman of BradBlog reported that the WH list of the "coalition of the willing" had been scrubbed, "
it’s here: www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/iraq/news/20030327-10.html
- Again the author uses Brad Blog:
And again from BradBlog just a few weeks ago, we learn that several WH transcripts for press briefings have been altered to expunge the occasions when Scott McClellan said "Go ahead, Jeff". Yes, that Jeff.
But they're not altered or expunged. Here are 9 instances of "Go ahead, Jeff" (Gannon) at whitehouse.gov:
- www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/12/20041203-8.html
- www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/08/20040809-5.html
- www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/02/20040219-3.html
- www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/04/20040401-4.html
- www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/07/20040715-7.html
- www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/06/20040615-7.html
- www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/04/20040429-4.html
- www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/05/20040506-8.html
- www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/03/20040309-5.html
- Again the author uses another one from BradBlog:
some audio/video links—especially the link to Bush's March 13, 2002 Press Conference in which he'd said..."I truly am not that concerned about him [bin Laden]."
I'm pretty sure it’s here: www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/03/20020313-8.html
Robots/txt and their uses:
The story of whitehouse.gov robots/txt and their uses can be found here:
"whitehouse.gov" "robots.txt" 2003
"Most, if not all, of the problematic "disallow" statements noted below have been corrected"
October 28, 2003: 2600 Magazine contacted the White House in the process of writing a story about the robots.txt file. The story also notes that the robots.txt file changed in the past day, so that the current robots.txt file is different from the file archived Friday, Oct 24.
Whitehouse.gov robots.txt disallow "iraq"
The Wayback Machine, Internet Archive
Anyone who used the Wayback machine on February 25 for whitehouse.gov will find a completely different picture today. There are almost twice as many listings, all with asterisks, meaning that those pages have been updated. This can NOT be taken as proof of the conspiracy theory that the whitehouse.gov website is getting scrubbed, but it can be taken as an indication that the whitehouse.gov website has undergone a complete overhaul. If you think something is missing, ask David Almacy.
Google vs. Clusty
Run the search terms site:whitehouse.gov "iraq" for google you get 50,600 results.
Run the search terms site:whitehouse.gov "iraq" with Clusty you get 489,900 results.
If there are any whitehouse.gov files being disallowed by robots/txt with the term "iraq" in Google, they’re still there in Clusty. Time to change your search engine.
Does the White House scrub files?
I have no doubt that the whitehouse.gov website has been manipulated, most notably in the 'Mission Accomplished' speech, when they inserted 'Major' into 'Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended'
White House Alters Webpages About Iraq Combat
An informative discussion between Brad Friedman and Jim Gilliam about whitehouse.gov site scrubbing is here: White House Is Not Scrubbing Its Site Whether it's a conspiracy or stupidity is discussed here
My vote is both. On the stupidity side... if the whitehouse.gov webmeister is scrubbing embarrassing material he might start with the "President Bush Announces Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended" page.