The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto. 

All the News That’s Fit to Scrub
“In my house growing up, The Times substituted for religion,” Jill Abramson told the New York Times yesterday upon being designated the paper’s new executive editor. “If The Times said it, it was the absolute truth.”

This quote prompted blogress Ann Althouse, who is a much nicer person than we are, to contemplation:

Let’s analyze the analogy. A newspaper is like religion, believed in, and taken, unquestioningly, as true. Then what happens when you are in charge of it?

1. You have a deep moral obligation to insure that it is absolutely true, to respect the faith that others put in it and to preserve and grow the community of believers because of your dedication to truth, or…

2. You are embedded in the faith, carrying on the commitment to the idea that it is the truth and impressing that faith that it is the truth on readers, so that they keep looking to you as the mouthpiece of truth and don’t go wandering off looking for some other viewpoints.

It could be #1 or #2 or both or neither.

So, which is it? The Abramson quote, which caused quite a stir when it appeared in a story on the Times website yesterday, is no longer there. That argues for #2 over #1.

In fact, we’re guessing Jill’s family included a big brother, because this reminds us of “1984”: “Winston dialled ‘back numbers’ on the telescreen and called for the appropriate issues of The Times, which slid out of the pneumatic tube after only a few minutes’ delay. The messages he had received referred to articles or news items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, as the official phrase had it, to rectify.”

Winston Smith, protagonist of George Orwell’s dystopian novel, worked for the Ministry of Truth, known in Newspeak as “Minitrue.” The Times’s handling of the Abramson story is more Minitrue than absolute truth.

To be sure, the procedure that led to the scrubbing of the Abramson quote from the Times piece isn’t designed to be Orwellian, and it involved the opposite of a “back number.” The Times often posts to its website early versions of stories that are slated for the next day’s paper, which are later replaced with the final print versions, often reflecting extensive rewriting and editing. That is what happened here, as the “06/03” in the story’s URL and the slug “03paper” make clear.

Here’s how Abramson is quoted in the new version of the story:

Ms. Abramson, 57, said being named executive editor was “the honor of my life” and like “ascending to Valhalla” for someone who read The Times as a young girl growing up in New York. “We are held together by our passion for our work, our friendship and our deep belief in the mission and indispensability of The Times,” she said. “I look forward to working with all of you to seize our future. In this thrilling and challenging transition, we will cross to safety together.”

This quote is a bit weird too, but it’s a lot less embarrassing–and, more pertinently, less newsworthy–than the one that was scrubbed. It’s obvious that an editorial decision was made to “rectify” a quote that made the Times look foolish.

In fairness to Abramson, this didn’t happen on her watch, which doesn’t begin until September. Still, if she turns out to be as gaffe-prone as this incident suggests, her tenure at the Times will be a lot of fun for us.

How to Horrify Hendrik Hertzberg
As a young man Hendrik Hertzberg worked in the Carter White House. Now he writes about politics for The New Yorker. Today he has a piece at the magazine’s website on the impending transition at the New York Times. This passage caught our attention:

Ten years ago, the nonexistence of the New York Times was as unimaginable a thought as the nonexistence of the Roman Catholic Church. Now that it’s all too imaginable, it’s correspondingly more horrifying–as horrifying as the (somewhat less likely) prospect of the nonexistence of the United States of America. Maybe more so: remember what Jefferson said about a government without newspapers.

This is a bit confusing with all the double negatives, and we certainly don’t mean to question anyone’s patriotism, but did Hendrik Hertzberg really just say that the thought of the New York Times’s demise horrifies him more than the thought of America’s?

For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for the “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below “Today’s Columnists.