While there’s no doubt that something is going on to make Google searches garbage, news outlets don’t publish retractions lightly. I’m inclined to believe that they are convinced that the story was substantially inaccurate.
Short of visiting their newsroom and asking to see the documents in question, which no self-respecting journalist would share, we’ll have to trust them.
However, having directed a newsroom in a previous life, I can tell you that a retraction is the last thing any editor wants to do. A minor error would be chalked up to working under a deadline and corrected in the next follow-up. A major error would get a stand-alone correction. The error has to be egregious to get a retraction.
Libel might be a threat, but it’s devilishly difficult to prove that a news outlet has libeled a corporation. So long as the story were factually accurate, there’s nothing Google could plausibly threaten that would prompt a retraction.
While there’s no doubt that something is going on to make Google searches garbage, news outlets don’t publish retractions lightly. I’m inclined to believe that they are convinced that the story was substantially inaccurate.
Why do you think so?
They could have been threatened by Google or Google might have shown them the correct documents, but how would we be able to tell?
Short of visiting their newsroom and asking to see the documents in question, which no self-respecting journalist would share, we’ll have to trust them.
However, having directed a newsroom in a previous life, I can tell you that a retraction is the last thing any editor wants to do. A minor error would be chalked up to working under a deadline and corrected in the next follow-up. A major error would get a stand-alone correction. The error has to be egregious to get a retraction.
Libel might be a threat, but it’s devilishly difficult to prove that a news outlet has libeled a corporation. So long as the story were factually accurate, there’s nothing Google could plausibly threaten that would prompt a retraction.