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ABCNewsWorthy
November 4, 1998
ABCNews.Com got the attention of the Drudge Report and other news sites when they accidentally made available some pages with dummy election results for the elections in the US.
On one side ABC News, a news gathering organisation, has to protect their integrity. And in their position, they have to apologise and say there is no bias, even with fictitious numbers. But when does that end and being anal-retentive start?
Oops!
Someone familiar with the events that preceded the coverage shared some background on how this story started.
ABCNews.Com and Starwave were testing their setup for Election Day on November 2, which included some pages built that used election results from Voter News Service, which was providing election results.
As established, there was no election during the testing so they used dummy election results. In the end, their search engine for some reason added these pages to the index that weren't intended for public viewing.
Anyhow, the story quickly spread through newsgroups and mailing lists when someone found the pages using the search engine and ended up with mirror copies of the pages and a report being posted on the Drudge Report.
DrudgeWorthy
With conspiracy theories and jokes about the election results on ABCNews.Com flowing through newsgroups and mailing lists, Drudge was probably on the ball to grab a copy and tell the grapevine of this wicked tale.
It sounds serious when Drudge said: "ABC NEWS was hit with the biggest online nightmare of the Internet Era when complete election results were somehow displayed on its World Wide Website…"
It didn't take long for other news sites to join the party and post stories on ABCNews.Com's mistake.
Anal-Retentive (with a hyphen)
ABCNews.Com clearly had some problem in their workflow that let loose these articles that were being used to test their systems prior to Election Day.
Did you know (from Wired News): "In October 1995, Pathfinder declared O. J. Simpson "Guilty" in his criminal trial, moments after the jury had acquitted him." How much of this information do we have to keep compiling?
Beyond Drudge's hyperbole, the story to my knowledge was mainly limited to coverage on other websites. But I wonder how things are going to move forward worrying about the tiniest details.
What comes around, goes around.
Later,
Lawrence
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