By Michael Hall,
Editor
Retractions and corrections should get the same play as the
assertion itself, so here’s one from LT: Lee Gomes, the Wall St.
Journal reporter who wrote
regarding Microsoft’s “uphill battle against Linux” says MSNBC
did not remove references to Solaris in use at Microsoft despite
differences in the story.
Though it was reported by a reader first on LinuxToday, The
Register also picked up the story of some strange variations
between a piece written by Gomes that seemed to airbrush out
references to Microsoft competitors.
In the story run by the Wall St. Journal, references to the
software running Hotmail read:
“Microsoft said that since last summer, Hotmail has
been running on both Windows 2000 and the Solaris operating system
from Sun Microsystems Inc.,”
In a version run by MSNBC later in the day, the sentence
read:
“Microsoft said Hotmail has been running on Windows
since last summer.”
In a
letter sent to Dave Winer, Gomes, the author of the piece, said
the difference was due to two different versions of the story he
wrote himself. The one that ran on the Wall St. Journal page, run
later in the day, had been corrected by Gomes to include the
reference to Solaris. The version that ran on MSNBC, an earlier
version, had no such reference. MSNBC has since received and
published Gomes’ final version.
The
Register’s piece on the error contains some additional
information on the issue, including the fact that some of the
changes made were, in fact, not horribly pejorative.
Though LinuxToday’s involvement in the story goes no further
than bumping the story up to the top of the page and adding an
italicized note to the lead, we regret any aspersions our handling
of the story may have cast on the integrity of the editorial staff
at MSNBC.