It’s easy enough to switch information around on a Wikipedia page, but how do you erase the cache of saved pages in the Google SERP’s?

If you googled “Rohde” and found the Wikipedia page in the results, you hit the cache link and see a snapshot of the site as it appeared a few months before.

Any story, comment, snipit or blog posting that was spidered by Google is in the search engine’s cache. It’s viewable even after it’s gone. If you were searching for this story, you would have found it.

People will google “The Hills” or “Michael Jackson” for hours on end. I just don’t believe that people that would kidnap an American wouldn’t spend more than 10 minutes googling their hostage.

Whatever happened I’m happy this guy is ok.

http://www.deep...self-home-test/

Hence the truth is out; almost all you read anywhere is manipulated or spun! There is no place where true freedom of expression is tolerated. We all live in controlled environments.

Wikipedia has lost it’s facade of high ideals and the truth is that we the public are the poorer for it. We hoped in our millions in perennial hope for something better that being a sheep.

But here we are just sheep, being manipulated, monitored and controlled.

The internet was a good hope for freedom but it is slowly being soured by Governments everywhere, I am not sure if we will ever have real freedom, but I for one applaud Anonymous from Florida, for at least trying to get his voice heard

You don’t want to sacrifice David’s life for your value of telling the truth.

Laudable? Hardly, more apropos would be disgusting hypocrisy.

You write “what’s special about this case is that it’s clear now that these terrorists have made specific targets of journalists”

The Taliban and Al Qaeda have been very clear that they target *all* westerners.

Journalists are certainly a high value target, but their *lives* are of equal value to other citizens.

As just one example, Red Cross Workers have been kidnapped, and the NYTimes further jeapordized their lives by reporting it (http://query.ny...75AC0A9619C8B63).

The NYTimes had no problem reporting on the kidnapping of Daniel Pearl, and he’s a journalist. (Just not a NYTimes employee.)

The NYTimes has repeatedly been asked in the past not to detail certain military plans because it would jeapordize an ongoing operation, yet they frequently ignore these requests.

Sure seems hypocritical to me.

It’s not a political or election-based opinion.

The NYT isn’t altruistic because they’ve valued a report over the safety of others plenty before.

Second, what’s special about this case is that it’s clear now that these terrorists have made specific targets of journalists, and it’s also clear now, after the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl, that trying to publicly pressure these kidnappers to release journalists held as hostages puts those hostages in more danger and encourages the terrorists to try and take more journalists hostage. The US has never had to deal with terrorists like this before; previous generations of terrorists, such as the PLO and its offshoots, were sensitive to public pressure in many hostage situations, because they were trying to advance their cause partly by appealing to public opinion. And they tended not to target journalists, because journalists provided them with a way to spread their message. The Taliban and their associates are different. They aren’t looking to earn Western support. They don’t believe that having any Western reporters in their countries provides any benefit. And they’ve made journalists targets because they know think that kidnapping journalists will get more attention and that, in general, journalists often work for Western corporations they might be able to successfully blackmail for cash. And the downside of kidnapping journalists is that they have to settle for ridding their country of one more journalist, which is a victory for them in and of itself

I can kind of sympathize with those who believe that information should not be kept from the public regardless of the consequences. But those who can’t see what makes this case different just don’t want to look.

PS – On a different note, it is funny to see that people pop up arguing that the New York Times is no longer relevant. The Times now is more widely read and more influential than it has been at any previous point in its history. Even if you don’t read the Times at all, it’s impossible to escape its influence in the blogosphere. Its financial problems are serious and what importance it will have in the future is open to question, but anybody who doesn’t see that the net the growth net and the collapse of much of the mainstream media has enabled the Times to greatly expand its influence is living in an alternate dimension. The Times’ mystical status has probably declined, but one of the reason the Times got labeled the “paper of record” is that 40 years ago, it published many stories of international and national importance that were so boring that absolutely no one read them beyond the editor and the government official quoted in the story.

I guess we’ve all gotten well past the point where we expect the media to be unbiased and honest but that doesn’t mean I can’t be unhappy with the situation.