Okay, one error struck-through. Now this:

"In the post, titled All Elbows, to his Meeker on Media blog on The Telegram newspaper's website, Meeker went as far as accusing Cochrane of suppressing a major story."

In that post, I accused Cochrane of no such thing. Click the link and read it. Cochrane therefore did not "fire back." His comment was calm and reasoned. The editorializing is unfair and inflammatory.

Geoff, you make some good points here. The whole issue of how one deals with changing information online is extremely tricky, as you of all people well know.

The prospect of republishing and unpublishing something potentially defamatory is something that media lawyers are still trying to get their heads around, and I'm not going to comment on whether or not defamation came into the edits made on this post.

But the edits weren't as major as you imply. We took out some inaccurate references, and in order to ensure clear accuracy in what was left we felt it necessary to add some quotes and a disclosure.

We're sorry to have left in an additional inaccuracy. Thanks for pointing it out - we've now amended the post (see strikeout).

But where our post states that you "acknowledged the editing in a follow-up post,” we intended nothing in the least derogatory. A comment is a follow-up post, as is this comment you're reading now. You acknowledged your editing, as we acknowledged our editing and are doing again here.

The irony in all this is evident, graceless or not, and no doubt we will all learn more about the medium as we go on.

For everyone's edification as well as our own, I would like to see a column in J-Source that fully addresses evolving practice in online editing and unpublishing, and we hope to assign that soon.

- Ivor Shapiro, Editor-in-Chief. J-Source.

There are some glaring factual errors and blatant hypocrisy here which require a response.

The first error occurs in the second paragraph, when you claim I accuse Cochrane of suppressing a major story in my “All Elbows” blog entry. That is wrong. Nowhere in the post do I even mention Cochrane.

There is a quote from the premier, in which he muses that selling the Hydro asset to pay down the entire provincial debt would be a good thing. The quote is from Hansard, April 30, 2008.

In the comments section, Cochrane politely wades in and explains the story behind the quote, and I did applaud him for that. He did not “fire back”, because no one fired anything at him. He is not mentioned in the blog. You are not just in error, you are drawing battle lines where none existed.

I replied to Cochrane, in a similarly friendly tone (as I always do in the comments section). But I did point out that media’s decision not to do the story had other ramifications, including the fact that Williams’s quote would outlive everyone in Hansard.

This argument has considerable merit, as my blog entry was picked up that same day in a New Brunswick paper, without Cochrane’s explanation, and you can be sure has flooded inboxes across the Maritimes, Quebec and beyond. The discussion of whether media made a mistake that day, by not covering the story (as described in my “For the Record” entry) is very clearly a valid one.

However, I did use the word “suppress” at least twice in that entry to describe media’s treatment of the story. That was a mistake. I said so, and, out of respect for David (no other journalist was named in the story) I offered him a personal, informal apology.

In paragraph six, you say I “acknowledged the editing in a follow up post”, which implied I was being sneaky or evasive. This is wrong. I noted the change in the same post, in the comments section, which is where all the action was, at that point. I also wrote about it in far more detail in my “Nasty Charges” post, after Whittle suggested I was violating standards of online journalism.

Which brings me to the grand paradox, the graceless irony, of this whole debacle. The post I read here yesterday was completely different from what appears above. A note says the “original version contained inaccurate information.” That must have been a lot of mistakes. The post has been rewritten.

And there is no real explanation of why.

Were there factual inaccuracies? If so, what were they? Oh, and you missed a few.

Was it defamatory to someone? If so, where’s the apology?

Does J-Source see the irony of running a post, attacking me for changing a few words – despite explaining why I did so – while they rewrite an entire entry without explanation?

And Peter Whittle, if J-Source can edit text, so can I. You owe me an apology.