DEVELOPING: The Washington Post, which had to retract several false Russiagate stories after winning a Pulitzer, has quietly without explanation removed its entire historic archive from the Lexis-Nexis database. All articles have vanished without a trace.Not even abstracts remain

— Paul Sperry (@paulsperry_) December 12, 2023

[Good question and a good catch by Sperry, but I suspect this may be a contract issue of some sort. The Washington Post maintains its own historic archive, and a search on ‘Russia collusion Trump‘ still returns over 1400 links to previous articles. The sudden disappearance of the entire archive makes this seem more of a conflict with Lexis-Nexis rather than a memory hole. However, it does raise some questions, especially whether the WaPo did that in order to maintain curation control over its archive. In other words, even though my search got 1400+ relevant responses, are there some missing that the Post wanted to memory-hole? That *would* be a reason to cut ties with Lexis-Nexis. Stay tuned. I suspect, though, that this will either be a licensing dispute between the two, or just an error at Lexis-Nexis. (I don’t have an L-N account to check on this myself. Those are prohibitively expensive.) — Ed]