Thread by @charles_gaba

Journalistic ethics question: If you post a blog entry today & then discover you made a factual error, you should correct it. However, what if you look at something you wrote, say, 5 years ago and realize that you had something factually wrong at the time? 1/

You can obviously add a correction, but what if the entire premise (or a major portion of it) turns out to simply be dead wrong? Do you delete/unpublish it? Add a note at the top saying "everything below turned out to be nonsense?" How far back do you take that sort of thing?

For instance, here's my very first ACA Signups blog post, which I wrote over at @DailyKos back on October 11, 2013, before ACASignups.net was even created. I added the following catch-all mea culpa for the first month of entries:
acasignups.net/21/05/07/84000…

Making this even more complicated: Let's say your post from 5+ years ago quotes *another* source which later turns out to have had *their* facts wrong. I don't mean deliberate disinformation, I mean they simply made a mistake. How far down the rabbit hole do you go?

Don't ask me how, but this issue somehow arose out of a discussion with my son about how badly the CGI effects in "The Last Starfighter" have aged since 1984 (we were mainly discussing George Lucas massively overdoing the effects in the Star Wars Special Editions.)

We were discussing when it's appropriate for someone to "clean up" their prior work and when they should leave well enough alone. In Lucas' case, digitally remastering the originals and cleaning up visible wires, graininess, etc was fine...but he didn't know when to stop.

Also, from a cultural touchstone POV, LucasFilm has been such an important part of our technological and pop cultural history that it's important to *see* how special effects have developed over time.

The prosthetic head in the "eye surgery" scene from the original Terminator was *terrible*, but I don't think Cameron has gone back to fix it even though it'd be simple to do these days, has he?

On the other hand, I read he edited Titanic to get the *night stars* correct!