Bill Kristol, the New York Times‘ newly-resident conservative, wrote a boneheaded column in today’s paper in which he declares…well, it’s not important what he declared. The point is, it was completely wrong. His source was the right-wing website Newsmax.com, which is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a reliable source. Anyway, Kristol had to publish a correction, and the entire blogosphere has been abuzz with the news all day, so if you’re that curious, just search for it on Google. What’s interesting is that now the author of the piece on Newsmax.com, one Ronald Kessler, is trying to remove this incident from his Wikipedia page.
This kind of battle simply can’t be won: it’s become known as the Streisand effect, after Barbara Streisand tried to have an aerial photo of her house removed from the Internet and copies of the picture simply multiplied like tribbles all over cyberspace. The same thing happened not too long ago with the publication of the HD-DVD encryption key number on the Internet, the Church of Scientology’s efforts to remove a video of Tom Cruise speaking about Scientology, and a zillion other examples. You simply can’t remove this sort of thing from the Internet. It won’t work, it only makes people curious, and the Internet moves too fast for this sort of thing to be effective.
