Among the audience response to the 大象传媒 in the past 24 hours were calls complaining that 大象传媒 Two's Daily Politics was biased against the Conservative party, and others claiming it was biased against the Labour party. Some callers thought generally 大象传媒 News had given Michael Owen's injury too high a priority. Several complained at the degree of football coverage on radio and TV. One complaint said it was wrong to refer to 21 June as "the longest day", since all days are 24 hours long.
We also received this e-mail, which proves the value of giving as much information as possible:
I did not see anywhere anything that told us what wine the Queen had with the meal that was cooked for her 80th celebration Lots about the food but could you let me know what wine they had with each course?
- Paul Brannan
- 22 Jun 06, 12:21 PM
One of the great strengths of the web is its function as a searchable, retrievable archive. The ability to isolate and zoom in on information has made Google one of the powerhouse companies of the last decade.
But there's a cloud to every silver lining and that ability to summon up items from the past can cause thorny problems in the present, as we've found on the news website.
What should we do when a reader asks for the removal from the site of something he or she had said several years ago? People's views, after all, can change, and the positions one takes as a young person are not always the same after a few years. With a trend for employers to "Google" prospective employees, those comments could be potentially damaging to future job prospects.
In the past, retrieving such information from, say, a local paper would have been time-consuming and an unlikely recourse for an employer. Now, with the results available in a few seconds, past indiscretions can quickly become public knowledge.
My instinct is to refuse requests for removal; airbrushing material from the past just feels plain wrong and could open the door to hundreds, if not thousands, of revisionist requests. It seems to me that you have to live by the consequences and if you've expressed a view in a public forum you have to accept that it might come back to haunt you.
For the future though, might this realisation of Google-power sound the death knell of the and phone-in?
Paul Brannan is editor of 大象传媒 Emerging Platforms
