Driver 8 is asking whether Salon’s retracting the Tom White story is inconsistent with a past position taken editorially:
To quote Scott, “That sounds good, but it gives the magazine a convenient out, a chance to bury the embarrassing incident. There’s no reason the magazine couldn’t ‘continuously publish’ the stories with an explicit statement that they’re not honest and truthful. Time’s approach is what the New Republic should have adopted: Leave the stories up, leave the historical record intact and append a note to readers (with appropriate links) explaining the subsequent history. With this method of dealing with errors, journalists can actually make the Web function better than print: After all, you don’t find magazines going into the library stacks inserting notes of retraction into bound volumes.
It’s a tough call either way, but I imagine the article will be preserved by the wayback machine and its ilk