Commentary

Make America Wayback Again

One of my pet peeves about the shift to digital media in general, and the internet in particular, is that it erodes our historic public record.

Unlike analog media, where there was an indelible, physical source of the who, what, when and where of how things happened, digital publishers routinely update, remove or replace content willy-nilly and on-the-fly to represent how they want things to look at the moment.

This has been especially challenging for journalists like me who were trained to think in an era of analog media where the posterity and historical context of published content mattered, warts and all.

It's one of the reasons MediaPost has such a clunky process for publishing corrections and clarification that actually source the previously incorrect information. I mean, how else can you set the record straight, if you don't point out what was wrong about it in the first place?

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I'm seeing less and less of that record-straightening over time, not just from journalists but from information publishers of all kinds, and I believe it has contributed to the rise of misinformation, as well as an erosion of trust in published content overall.

So it's cool when a publisher finds a nifty workaround for resetting the public record.

If you want to see a great example of that, read Sarah Mahoney's excellent story on MediaPost today about how the team at TheSkimm created a workaround to preserve White House information vital to women's health when the new administration shut down ReproductiveRights.gov.

TheSkimm's workaround: It scraped all of the previously published White House information via Internet Archive and republished it on a new TheSkimm-owned site: ReproductiveRightsDotGov.com.

Genius!

More than that, it's an innovative way for other publishers to begin restoring and preserving vital government information that new administrations remove from public access and attempt to destroy the historical record.

I'm often torn with whether the internet has lived up to its promise of "democratizing media," or has actually done the opposite.

But there is one place on the internet that has lived up to the idea: Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.

Since it was launched in 1996, the nonprofit has archived nearly a trillion pages and associated images and other content for posterity in order to preserve the public record.

The last Trump Administration did all it could to reduce transparency, remove historic public records, and promote alternative facts, and it doesn't look like 2.0 is wasting anytime doing it once again, this time on steroids.

Wouldn't be great if other publishers focused on other areas of White House public records utilized the Wayback Machine to preserve other areas of the public record for the next four years, and generations to come.

Meanwhile, click the explainer video above if you want to hear how TheSkimm did it.

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