These are the first three paragraphs of the same GMA article. On the left is the page as it appeared on December 4th, 2020. On the right, the same page as it appears today. Besides the creepy attempt to avoid any “gendered terminology” by replacing any mention of the words “women” and “breastfeeding” with a variety of bland, euphemistic language (because those are offensive words now, apparently), do you notice anything curious about these revisions?
No, really. This is the same article. Although the web archive for the article only displays the current, revised page, even going as far back as December third, when I visited the page on December 4th, it was a different article.Â
The archive doesn’t display the original page, probably due to some web design trickery related to GMA’s unique loading process. But those sneaky web developers didn’t think of everything! The content card (the card displayed on social media) for the archived page displays the original headline at the same URL.
The date of the article has been changed to December 14th, 2020, but there is no other indication that the article has been revised. No editor’s note, no explanation for the drastic change in tone between the two revisions, nothing. They are passing off the revised article as if it were the original article, with a different headline, but at the same location, with completely different text, and a vastly different takeaway.
The article appears to have been revised just after this tweet was posted by the CDC, creating a bit of cognitive dissonance.
This comes on the heels of the WHO getting busted quietly changing the definition of herd immunity, and Fauci admitting he misled the public about masks on numerous occasions, lying to the public just as easily as he told children that he flew to the North Pole and vaccinated Santa himself.
We know the science is moving pretty quickly as we learn more about COVID and more data becomes available about the vaccines, since we’re kind of learning as we go in regard to both, which I’m sure is fine, but are we supposed to believe that in the span of ten days, between when the original article was published and when it was “updated” with completely different text, a complete void of data on the potential impacts of the vaccines on pregnant women, who “weren’t included in trials,” has been sufficiently filled to assuage any possible concern that the vaccine might negatively impact pregnancy? Can we get a look at that data, please?
And what about the journalistic ethics of completely replacing one article with another, without so much as an editor’s note? Believe it or not, there are ethical guidelines for journalists. They are pretty clear: “Explain corrections and clarifications carefully and clearly.”
When journalists fail to abide these ethics, it is up to better journalists to “expose unethical conduct in journalism,” a responsibility which, in these troubling times, has ironically fallen to a conspiracy mill. Because somebody has to do it.
The Conspiracy Mill reached out to the author of the article, but she did not immediately respond to our request for comment.
