Guatemala: The Telegraph edits its own headline

Anyone thinking I was angry yesterday with the British publication I now with great justification call a rag, The Sunday Telegraph, ain’t seen nothin’.

The indignation over the irresponsible and blatantly manipulative story I expressed in yesterday’s blog was fierce, and valid, the letter I wrote to their editors condemning their decision to publish was intended to be scathing, and I am reasonably proud of both the post and the letter.

Today, however, prompts more.

A reader’s comment on the post suggested I had misrepresented the story by misquoting the headline. I had it as “US child snatchers plague Guatemala” and the commenter corrected that, saying the title was actually, “Guatemala’s child-snatching plague”.

My immediate reaction to seeing this was to question my own sanity, as I NEVER alter quotes, and if I quote a headline I quote it EXACTLY … so how could this be?

I rushed to the story via the link I’d provided, and found to my utter astonishment and dismay that the commenter was correct. The headline was “Guatemala’s child-snatching plague”.

My moments of self-doubt were extremely uncomfortable, and as I read and reread my post I searched high and low for other signs that I had somehow injected so much of myself that I’d completely lost objectivity to the point of making things up while thinking I was relating information.

THEN …

Then I Googled the headline I had quoted. Sure enough, there it is.

The Telegraph’s cached version of the story has the title I quoted exactly as I’d quoted it, while an obviously updated and altered version has the marginally less-offensive “Guatemala’s child-snatching plague” headline.

From the “Last updated” tag under the headline, … originally posted at 12:16 am BST, updated at 12:23 pm … it apparently took a good twelve hours for someone to decide to modify the story’s title, without mentioning anything about having done so. Could it be that letters pouring in caused a bit of a rethink? Or perhaps legal action was threatened? Maybe the Telegraph editor with the brain doesn’t start work until noon?

Whatever … the fact is that plopping a new headline on this story doesn’t change the fact that the story itself is rubbish, but it does indicate that some stepping-down was done and has me thinking that any trust in the Sunday Telegraph would be misplaced.

In the newspaper business and the world of journalism in general, published means published. A professional publication edits BEFORE the paper hits the stands … posting on the Internet being the modern version of exactly that … and if there’s a change to be made, it’s done with notification of correction and apologies, not surreptitiously sneaking in with the 2007 variety of White-Out and a marker.

A news organization that behaves so unethically is not to be trusted.

I would also like to point out that the Sunday Telegraph’s shifting headline was at issue here, not my integrity. I told it as it was. Unlike the Telegraph, I can be trusted.

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