Right to be Forgotten

Radiolab

WNYC Studios

Science, Natural Sciences, History, Society & Culture, Documentary

4.6 • 43.5K Ratings

🗓️ 4 August 2023

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In online news, stories live forever. The tipsy photograph of you at the college football game? It’s there. That news article about the political rally you were marching at? It’s there. A charge for driving under the influence? That’s there, too. But what if... it wasn’t?

Several years ago a group of journalists in Cleveland, Ohio, tried an experiment that had the potential to turn things upside down: they started unpublishing content they’d already published. Photographs, names, entire articles. Every month or so, they met to decide what content stayed, and what content went. In this episode from 2019, Senior Correspondent Molly Webster takes us inside the room where the editors decided who, or what, got to be deleted. And we talk about how the “right to be forgotten” has spread and grown in the years since. It’s a story about time and memory, mistakes and second chances, and society as we know it.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, this is Radio Lab. I'm Soren Wheeler. I'm sitting in today for Lulu and Latif, because
0:06.8	I have a show that I want to look back on. A little rewind into our past, something we do every
0:11.2	other week, which means that some of you may have already heard this one, but not to fear,
0:16.4	we'll be back with brand spanking new content next week. And also this is a really good story,
0:22.8	and it's one that feels to me as relevant, if not more relevant today than it was when we
0:28.2	heard it. And on top of that, at the end of the show, I will have an update from our senior
0:34.0	correspondent Molly Webster, who reported this piece, and together with our former producer,
0:40.2	Bethel Habtay, put it together. Anyway, the show is called The Right to Be Forgotten, originally
0:46.6	released in 2019. And what you'll hear is Molly telling the story to our host at the time,
0:53.6	Chad Avon-Rub.
0:54.8	Yeah, wait, wait, you're listening to Radio Lab from WNYC.
1:13.6	All right, here's a good one. This is a guy who's murder conviction overturned,
1:20.4	but he shot and killed somebody. I mean, this is violence, right? It ends up not being a crime,
1:26.9	but he took somebody's life with a gun.
1:33.7	Hey, I'm Chad Avon-Rub, this is Radio Lab, and we're going to start off today with a conversation
1:38.2	that happened in a conference room somewhere in Ohio. Let's see, so maybe just how I got to
1:44.5	clear this. Yeah, let me walk us through that. It comes to us from our reporter, Molly Webster.
1:49.2	So it was like September. We were looking around for stories for something. One of our challenges,
1:54.8	like bears or bad news, breaking things. And so I don't know if I've ever mentioned this,
2:00.3	but I'm from Ohio. Really? Yeah, I know, shocking. And so I thought, oh, I'll pull the Ohio card
2:08.8	right now. I'm going to look at this online news site, Cleveland.com.
2:15.4	But there's nothing in the story that is like harm. I mean, yes, it says he shot someone,
	...

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