QOTD: Controlling The Past And The Present?

The story goes something like this: A dealership claims to have Dale Earnhardt, Jr.’s C6-generation Corvette ZR1 for sale. The Drive publishes a breathless piece on this Corvette. Then Junior happens to notice the post and corrects them.

A print magazine would publish a correction. It’s been suggested that The Drive deep-six the post entirely. What’s the appropriate course of action here, for this and other situations like it?

What the site decided to do was this: change the title of the post, add a couple of exculpatory sentences, and finish the article like so:

Still, there’s presumably at least one Dale Junior fan out there with deep pockets and a love for Corvettes for whom this ’09 Corvette would be the car of his (or her) dreams. Here’s hoping he or she stumbles across it before Sunday afternoon.

You’d have to be a pretty big Junior fan to want a car just because Earnhardt once tweeted that he had nothing to do with it. One has to wonder if there’s a business model there…

Step 1: Open luxury hotel

Before this morning, however, The Drive disappeared that paragraph as well. Maybe it’s best to think of this article the way certain people think of the Constitution: as a “living document” that can say pretty much whatever’s convenient for you at any given moment.

In my days as Editor-In-Chief of this site, I had a policy where we would leave our mistakes in the public eye but make sure that the retractions were equally visible. My successors have tended to favor the “memory hole” approach where you make everything disappear. I don’t know if there is any consensus on what the correct course of action would be.

As for the ZR1 in question? Dale’s fans are already asking the state attorney general to look into what they feel is fraudulent promotion-by-association.

How should TTAC, and other outlets, behave in a case like this? Or is it more important that readers from both sides of the aisle can finally come together to identify a clear case of fake news?