What exactly is your criticism? That they published the original story? There's no such thing as perfection. It was caught and corrected. They seem to be operating at much higher than a "basic" level to me.

The criticism is the removal of the original article. Any correction should be in addition, not removal of already published content.

It's not a correction, it's a retraction. It's an admission that the story should not have been published, and that its assertions do not have NPR's standards of reported evidence.

> just plain censorship

Who are they censoring, themselves? The word "Censorship" has been so abused in the past few years it has ceased to have any real meaning in casual conversation.

You can read their rationale for removing it rather than updating it here: https://www.npr.org/sections/ombudsman/2018/04/12/601650762/...

> Turpin said, "In order to fix the problems, we would have essentially had to construct a different story," a process that he said would have been "intellectually dishonest. There comes a point that you can't fix a story appropriately." He said the decision was not made lightly; "we believe strongly we don't want to disappear material for any reason if we can possibly keep from taking it down."

Well yes, retraction is the act of withdrawing something, so I guess you could consider it "censorship" or at least self-censorship.

> What is published must not be purged.

Why? Why must everything automatically stay in perpetuity? NPR owns the story. They paid to write it, they chose to publish it, they paid to put it online. The story is theirs. Why can't they do whatever they want with it?

I'm curious if that kind of note would protect a publisher from potential legal liability, or if removing it is the only way to avoid that.

My criticism is that news orgs shoot first and ask questions later. Even the news orgs we hold in very high regard (NPR) do it. To me, that means it's a systemic problem with the profession.

They need to operate more like the justice system; you should be absolutely sure of the facts before you publish them. Yes, that means good stories sometimes won't be published, just like the justice system is sometimes unable to convict people even though they "did it".

> My criticism is that news orgs shoot first and ask questions later.

That's a gross generalization.

> Even the news orgs we hold in very high regard (NPR) do it.

Source?

> They need to operate more like the justice system; you should be absolutely sure of the facts before you publish them.

One should never use absolutes as there are exceptions to nearly everything.