No tough questions please, we’re the Guardian
At the end of October, The Guardian ran an interview with Noam Chomsky in which the interviewer, Emma Brockes, challenged his tendancy to play down massacres for which the US is not directly responsible.
A couple of days later, the paper published a letter from Chomsky grumbling that he’d managed to misrepresent himself and trying to reword his answers after the event.
Want to check out the interview for yourself? Well, you can’t.
As noted by Private Eye, on 17th November the Guardian announced that it had removed all traces of the interview from its website, so anyone who wants to look up the piece which Chomsky claimed she was “of course free to publish” will look in vain.
Monday 28 Nov 2005 | Paul | UK
The Chomsky / Brocke interview is transcribed here.
they’ll find the piece on chomsky’s own site. it was the guardian’s own decision to pull the piece, not chomsky’s. by publishing it himself, he is supporting their right to say stupid things, about him and about diana johnstone. the guardian pull stuff from their sites when they feel it could cause them trouble - witness the liam lawlor furore.
“the guardian pull stuff from their sites when they feel it could cause them trouble”
… and this is what I find objectionable.
so slag the gruan, or slag off the way libel works on the internet, but leave of quoting private eye on something they were off the mark on - chomsky never asked for the piece to be pulled. today’s gruan has yet more from ian mayes on this issue.
I’m not quite sure where your objection to quoting Private Eye comes from…
Chomsky grumbled about the interview, as claimed by Private Eye.
The Guardian pulled it, as claimed by Private Eye.
the implication of the private eye piece is clear, even to a cretin, so i’m presuming you got it. they are suggesting that chomsky, a defender of free speech in many scandalous instances (including holocaust deniers), had the article pulled. not only is this false, chomsky is perfectly happy to publish an article the guardian’s reader’s editor decided to pull. the fault is totally with the guardian. an online archive should be an online archive, full and complete. if you can get that day’s copy of the gruan in the library and read the article, you should be able to read the article on the gruan’s own site. the gruan were wrong to pull the piece when merely appending the correction to it would have sufficed. but, as they’ve proved in the liam lawlor case, sometimes there’s pieces they publish which they’d soonest forget ever made it to press.
The problem here is that you have noted that I sourced this to Private Eye - which I did because this is where I heard that the Chomsky interview had been pulled - and then appear to have re-read the Private Eye article rather than what I posted here.
The headline of this post is “No tough questions please, we’re the Guardian”. No mention of Chomsky and, I’d have thought, pretty clear on the subject of the post.
In the second paragraph, I said that Chomsky complained about the interview - which he did - and tried to reword his answers after the event - an opinion I still hold.
In the final paragraph, I observed that the Guardian had pulled the interview, which Chomsky had claimed that Emma Brockes was was “of course free to publish”.
In summary then, Emma Brockes challenged Noam Chomsky in an interview for the Guardian. Chomsky complained, which is fair enough - he has as much right as anyone else to defend his position. And then the Guardian wiped the article which, as you say, is not reasonable behaviour for a paper that maintains their website as an online news archive.
The stuff I post comes from a variety of sources and I do try to both ensure the accuracy - as far as I am able - of what I am posting, and to acknowledge where the story originally came from.
I suggest you read the post again, skipping the words “As noted by Private Eye” and then tell me how much of it you disagree with.