Clayton Cramer's BLOG

Clayton Cramer's BLOG

Down the Memory HoleRemember in 1984, where Winston's job was to revise newspapers of the past to keep up with the ever changing present? This is very interesting. A couple years ago, during the Katrina disaster, I linked to a CNN report and quoted it:
Overnight, police snipers were stationed on the roof of their precinct, trying to protect it from gunmen roaming through the city, CNN's Chris Lawrence reported.One New Orleans police sergeant compared the situation to Somalia and said officers were outnumbered and outgunned by gangs in trucks."It's a war zone, and they're not treating it like one," he said, referring to the federal government. ...One of my readers ran into that posting of mine--and noticed that the CNN report at that link no longer said anything like that. It was much, much more upbeat. Nothing about the police snipers on the roof. Did I copy the wrong link? Did I have a brief attack of delusion, and make something up?Nope. Lots of other people linked to that same CNN page, and quoted the same text. Like http://paulsplanet.blogspot.com/2005/09/fall-of-new-orleans_02.html and http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/002476.html .There were bloggers who quoted CNN exactly as I did, although with no link to the story: http://knemeyer.com/dk.cfm?a=cms,c,318,1 and http://www.flaregun.org/?feed=rss2&p=51 and http://gutternickle.net/blog/index.php/2005/09/02/something_i_don_t_want_to_forget_about_kDid something go down the memory hole? If that story was inaccurate, they should have identified it as inaccurate, and updated it. This dramatic transformation of a story that played a big part in creating bad press for President Bush really smacks of something very Orwellian."We have always been at war with Eastasia."