The Trouble With Unpublishing the News

Once upon a time, not very long ago, publishing was a massive, visceral operation. It required buckets of ink, reams of paper, and mammoth machines that clanked and roared and churned. To stop the presses was a violent decision -- also, a costly one. Publishing nowadays seems muted in comparison. All it takes to make a news article appear -- or disappear -- is the silent press of a button from a handheld smartphone. But removing an article from the web is still arguably the most dramatic choice a news organization can make.

Which is why BuzzFeed caused a stir when it chose to delete a post that was critical of a new beauty campaign by Dove. "Once again, soap is acting condescending," BuzzFeed's Arabelle Sicardi wrote. The article was removed and replaced with a message that says, "We pulled this post because it is not consistent with the tone of BuzzFeed Life." (BuzzFeed republished the post, saying the initial deletion was in violation of its editorial standards. BuzzFeed's top editor explained the choice in a memo to employees.) Many journalists, naturally, find the whole situation to be suspicious. If the given reasons for pulling the post don't add up, then what's really going on? Are there different sets of standards for different sections of the site? Did BuzzFeed cave to pressure from an angry advertiser? (Dove is one of the site's advertising partners.) Perhaps the real explanation is less nefarious as a reflection of BuzzFeed and more troubling for the state of the larger media industry: Unpublishing is easy. Editorial decisions are sometimes arbitrary. More slippery are the instances in which stories are not deleted but changed without explanation. If a site that has been more transparent than most about its guidelines for unpublishing is inconsistent about following its own standard, what does that mean for the rest of the Internet? It's a question that has to be asked but, without a paper trail, can never fully be answered.