Are Reporters at MSNBC Being Censored By Their Editors and/or the Government?

Lucus 08/05/07

I was in both "Shock and Awe" when a fellow activist asked me if I had seen the "Was Attack An Inside Job?" link that was posted on the home page of MSNBC. I thought he was joking at first. I quickly went to MSNBC to see what he meant and sure enough, there it was, plain as day. It was part of a two part story about "Tricky Iraq Alliances".

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Well to my dismay, when I clicked the link, I ended up with a "Page Not Found". The article had been removed by MSNBC and was replaced by an automatic script page that's used when articles are removed. The "Page Not Found" page usually links up to popular stories so the public sees something interesting and stays on the MSNBC site and does not click off to someplace else.

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Then I noticed the low ID number on the page, got suspicious, and decided to investigate deeper. The ID numbers for new stories are running in the 20116200 range and it was odd that the ID number for this story was only at 2011.

I went back to the home page and clicked on the related Iraq article and the ID number for that page was 20116269.

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I decided to manually type ID numbers that were one digit away from the 20116269 ID. When I typed in 20116270 I pulled up a story about highway closures in Florida. Then I typed in 20116268 and I pull up an empty template of a page that used to exist. Someone had deleted all the content from this page.

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It does not take a rocket scientist to see what happened here.

A reporter had written an article that was very critical of the events unfolding in Iraq. Somebody, somewhere, whether it be the reporter's editor or a Government official thought that the article had too much truth in it for the public's viewing pleasure.

They erased the content and changed the link ID to go to a non existent article so the public would have their attention diverted to the "Most Viewed" story generated by the "Page Not Found" script.

You may ask;

Why not just delete the entire page, would that not be easier?

The answer is no. If  MSNBC just deleted the page of a story they had to kill, it would leave thousands of unused ID numbers floating around so they delete the content of that page and leave the template up to be used at a later date. MSNBC is a huge site with hundreds of thousands of pages and it would just cause problems if web masters started deleting the pages. Also, it allows the template to be there so when they decide to fill that ID slot, a webmaster can just punch in the content without having to go through the whole process of setting up an ID number.

You also may ask;

Why not delete the link from the home page?

A site like MSNBC has many web designers that work for them. There is one person in charge of JUST the home page, and many other various web designers that work on related articles. These web designers do not have access to the main page because MSNBC could never allow an unscrupulous or upset web designer that may have a beef with MSNBC to have access to that main page. He may decide to post an article that is not benefiting to their needs. Only their most trusted and dedicated web master is allowed to access that home page.

It will be gone by tomorrow I am sure of that, but this point it is no big deal as the content of the article has vanished, never to be seen again.

We all know that the reporters want to break the big story. If they were allowed, they would belch the truth out loud and clear for all to hear. It's not the reporters that hold back the story, it's the editors. Are the editors being told what is and what's not allowed by the U.S. Government?

What attack was the reporter talking about "Being an Inside Job"?

This is not the first time that strange things happen at MSNBC when it comes to "Touchy" subjects.

Back on November 11th of 2006 I went to the MSNBC home page and noticed a link to a video that said "How will Bush be remembered?".

I bet you will not be surprised by the results of clicking that link...

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