Its common for political parties in the UK to delete old content / speeches.

Mainstream media gets attacked for not doing enough fact checking, but also gets attacked for removing incorrect stories. I guess there's no way to win.

Removing stories completely is akin to hiding the fact taht you failed in your journalistic responsibilities. It would be better for the integrity of the journalist if the story remained available with the details of the failure plastered above/below etc.

Don't erase your mistakes - own up to them.

If your story unfairly libels someone, particularly a private individual, that presents its own ethical challenges, doesn't it?

Not at all. One could do as NPR has done in this case: Remove the original story and replace it with a statement of why it has been retracted. Nothing is hidden, and the incorrect story is removed.

I guess my concern is someone looking you up and the results being dominated by results like "Joe Smith, 55, of 22 East Wessex St, caught stealing from orphans" being a problem, even if clicking through shows a correction rather than the original story.

It is owning up to the mistake - hence the published retraction.

Being an authority on truth is a challenging role that requires caution and responsibility.

Doesn't mean we should throw the baby out with the bathwater, but we should hold journalists to a high standard - journalistic standards have weakened in the past decade with the rise of clickbait and promoting partisan editorials as news.

Agreed, but journalism and journalists are meanwhile being facetiously attacked as "#FakeNews". And I don't think we should hold journalists up to a higher standard than elected officials; or, to be accurate, I don't think we should allow either journalists or elected officials a low moral and ethical standard.

Get it right the first time.

If you can’t, don’t pretend to.

Especially with software, right everyone?

Even the atom bomb was tested at least once.

But not in production.

The first two atomic bombs in production were considerably different designs from each other, and there was only one test explosion before those two, so doesn't that mean that at least one bomb was in fact tested in production?

No bugs ever made it to production.

There is a very easy way to win. Do not censor stuff. Own up to your mistakes and failings. Be responsible for what you publish. Maybe that is a foreign concept to modern "journalists".

What do you want NPR to do in this case? You may think they deserve mocking scare quotes around their profession, but these are real journalists trying to fix a mistake following industry guidelines.

Here [1] are NPR's own published guidelines on why they will supposedly not remove stories:

>"We are guided by a newsroom policy that says it is inappropriate to remove content from our Website. If a report is inaccurate, we will correct it and state why it has been altered. If relevant new information emerges, we will update or do a follow-up story. But our content is a matter of public record and is part of our contract with our audience. To simply remove it from the archive diminishes transparency and trust and, in effect, erases history. This is not a practice engaged in by credible news organizations or in line with ethical journalism."

[1] - http://ethics.npr.org/memos-from-memmott/how-to-explain-why-...

Wow good catch, you may want to share this as a top-level comment.

Found it from another comment (that is top-level): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16943135 Quite damning!

Yes, I'm sure modern journalists are all wrong and you're right.