Cover-up #1,235
Somebody tell me how this is OK (via MetaFilter). Time magazine publishes an essay by George Bush Sr. and Brent Scowcroft entitled “Why We Didn’t Remove Saddam”, and then, years later, selectively remove it from their site, ostensibly because they didn’t have the publisher’s permission to sell that article on their site. Yet Time routinely excerpts books in its issues. I’m not sure I believe that online reprint rights aren’t part of that contract, but if they are, fine. Then it’s Alfred A. Knopf who needs to be shitted upon. They are the publishers of the book excerpted, and strong-arming Time into pulling the story from its archive AND the table of contents for that issue is pure crap. To imagine that the online excerpt did not help the sales of Bush and Scowcroft’s book doesn’t make any sense, and depriving the public at large of an important piece of reasoning about the US invading/not invading Iraq is a miserable moral failure on their part.
What annoys me the most is that the article was probably squelched because of the Junior/Senior relationship, when the real issue is that a recent American President who was on the brink of invading Iraq enumerated all the (excellent) reasons why he turned back.
evan :: Nov.12.2003 :: NetBits :: 6 Comments »
There’s no cover up, this guy’s a moron. Standard excerpt contracts allow for one-time use of the material–Evan’s right. Also, it’s not Time’s content, so why would they pay to run it online?
The question is why would they stop running it online? it’s been there for years, and was only recently taken down.
No one’s saying there’s anything contractually foul here, but the ethics in use seem dubious. Suspect, even.
Nah, I think this guy’s been had, my guess is it was never on there. If you look at the URLs for the other content in that issue, the pattern of the names is different. Viz. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101980302-138657,00.html and http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101980302-138656,00.html link to the first two articles in that table of contents, and http://www.time.com/time/magazine/1998/dom/980302/special_report.clintons_29.html, the supposed book excerpt, doesn’t fit the pattern.
I think “Jim Warren” sees a conspiracy where there is none, or he just made it up.
Call me a skeptic–or an employee of a global news organization–but I’m inclined to trust Time Inc. before memoryhole.com.
To cement my distaste for consipracy weenies, I checked out Dow Jones’ news archive, and the excerpt’s not in there. My guess is that’s because Time Inc. didn’t have permission to store it.
I think I will call you an employee of a global news organization, or EGNO for short. This will replace DNA- in all future usage.
The article was posted for quite some time.
Evan, I bow to your superior web-surfing ability.