Stealth editing becomes stealth censorship

Airbrushed from history?  Words that were never written?  Did it not happen?  Was that the intention? We should be told.

News media around the globe, from the US to Australia, from India to the Gulf States, reported the story that the Guardian’s investigations executive editor, David Leigh, had admitted to engaging in phone hacking yet denied it when asked about it by the Guido Fawkes blog.  One of the most senior journalists at the paper which pursued the ‘phone hacking’ story so vigorously had himself been pressing * and # keys to listen to another person’s voicemails. Around the world the Leigh hacking story was deemed worthy of coverage.

But there is a bigger story to this that every UK citizen needs to know about.  It concerns the nefarious activities of a number of Britain’s journalists to collude with each other in an attempt to ‘walk back’ a story to remove it from public record.

As a bit of context, this blog has already previously pointed out the BBC, the world’s largest news gathering organisation whose stories have a global reach, ignored the story.  Completely.  Since the story re-emerged this month, because the BBC referred to Leigh’s hacking in a piece by Torin Douglas back in April,  it has published not a single word of the case against David Leigh, a case which underpins the gross hypocrisy of the Guardian’s position and criminal actions of its staff.  So interwoven are the left wing Guardian and left wing BBC, neither will do anything that harms the other, even if that means leaving their respective audiences in ignorance of an important story.

Elsewhere, although some UK newspapers ran the story on the back of the Guido Fawkes blog post, efforts to find reports of the story on the wire service run by the UK based Press Association turn up a blank too.  The PA, often accused of leftist bias, turned a blind eye to the Leigh story despite its substantial reporting of the phone hacking story.

But far worse than all this are efforts by some media outlets that have already run the story to delete their report in an attempt to airbrush it from history.  Let us be clear, this is not a retraction of the story.  This is not an open correction of an error.  It is a conscious effort to forever scrape from that outlet’s own virtual record any trace of their report in order to rewrite history.  It seems the UK audience is being denied news and information from the UK involving British journalists, because some British journalists will close ranks to shield each other.

Which paper has done this?  Is it a left wing rag?  The Mirror or the Star perhaps?  No.  This was the action of a supposedly truth seeking, supposedly conservative newspaper.

The Daily Mail.

Without explanation the Daily Mail has deleted the David Leigh phone hacking story.  A search to see if only the story’s title or location had changed shows it has not been moved or altered, simply deleted.  The only sign it ever existed is the Google search result thrown up when looking for stories about David Leigh and phone hacking.

Why is this important?  Because in months and years to come, when people look back to research a piece and see what had been reported at the time, the Daily Mail’s official digital archive and archive discs will not contain any trace of the story.  It is tantamount to telling a lie.  It is an effort to remove a story from history.  And no justification has been provided for it.  If you missed the now deleted article, here is a screengrab of it.

The Daily Mail should explain why the story has been deleted barely 10 days after it was published.  This is how history can be manipulated and managed by people with an agenda to conceal something.  And it should be of concern to everyone who cherishes the idea of an open and transparent news media.

How farcial it is that the record of this British story about the honesty or otherwise of the media in this country will be confined to a few mid-circulation papers such as the Express.  In contrast a large number of overseas titles, which saw the significance of the story and felt it important enough to report to their own domestic audiences, will be the source British researchers will need to rely on.

Again we see the dark underside of a self serving and manipulative element in the British media that is content to conceal facts inconvenient to their friends despite an obvious public interest significance.  The incestuous relationships between supposedly competing stables in the UK and the desire of too many journalists to put future career opportunities before a fearless pursuit of the truth, ill serves the British public and keeps many in a state of engineered ignorance.

If they can do it with the David Leigh story, what else are they choosing not to report to the British public?