We went back to 374 news articles we had already saved. A hundred and sixty-nine of them had changed. An argument about what the press said can't be settled afterwards - only by whoever kept a copy.
Crossbencher · 01 August 2026
A news story isn't a document. It looks like one. There's a headline, a date, a byline and a fixed web address you can send to a friend, and all of that is the trouble, because underneath it's a live surface and the text on it keeps moving.
We know because we go back and look. Between 19 and 22 July we re-read 374 news articles we had already captured. A hundred and sixty-nine of them had changed since we first saved them. Ninety-nine had changed substantively: new paragraphs, altered claims, a different account of what had happened, not a corrected typo. One BBC news page covering last week's change of government had picked up several fresh paragraphs after we first read it. Same address, same headline, different article.
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