ABSTRACT

This chapter explores both legal and ethical implications of the issue. 'The right to be forgotten' is a relatively new concept in human-rights law, but it deals in root ethical issues familiar to news people and their sources. Editors must routinely weigh the news' long-term role as a 'historical record' against its potential negative impacts on individuals. In the digital journalism era, publication is at the same time both more enduring and less static, creating new parameters and possibilities for ethical decision-making. Likewise, journalists have traditionally resisted the idea of 'unpublishing' – the retrospective redaction of error-free news reports. Stripped of legal foundations and arguments, the Grand Chamber's decision rested on two epistemological distinctions that, in our view, may also help journalists to begin resolving the previously described conflict between principles that tend to foster continuity and those that challenge it.