In the New York Times' recent reactionary grumble on the growing power of the Blogosphere, Katharine Q. Seelye wrote:

Individual newspapers and television stations generally reach a wider audience than individual blogs, and Mr. Eggers touched on this lopsidedness when he explained on his Web site why he was reprinting Mr. Kirkpatrick's e-mail messages: "It's the only remedy commensurate with the impact you enjoyed with your original piece."

But the power of blogs is exponential; blog posts can be linked and replicated instantly across the Web, creating a snowball effect that often breaks through to the mainstream media. Moreover, blogs have a longer shelf life than most traditional news media articles. A newspaper reporter's original article is likely to disappear from the free Web site after a few days and become inaccessible unless purchased from the newspaper's archives, while the blogger's version of events remains available forever.

And this poses a big problem for a medium previously quite comfortable with reshuffling history to suit its version of a narrative whenever it was politically expedient to do so. (The past is infinitely malleable, Winston.)

In what is promised to be a five part series, three parts of which are currently online, Marc Schulman has a long, detailed look at The New York Times' shifting editorial stance on Iraq. Part One begins by noting:

Except for a brief period during 1994, The Times’ editorial position was distinctly hawkish during the Clinton presidency. At no time did the Times express any doubts regarding the credibility of intelligence information pertaining to WMD. Throughout this period, the paper’s editors insisted on an aggressive UN-directed inspection regime, which was their preferred means to disarm Saddam’s Iraq. They frequently made note of Saddam’s efforts to thwart the inspectors, and insisted that Iraq must fully cooperate before the sanctions implemented at the end of the Gulf War should be lifted. The Times’ objective was the elimination of Iraq’s WMD, not regime change. Bringing democracy to Iraq was not a topic in its editorials.

Notwithstanding their preference for inspections, the editors did not shy away from advocating the use of air strikes – including unilateral American air strikes – if the obstacles constructed by Saddam made it impossible for the U.N.’s inspectors to fulfill their missions. The Times endorsed every U.S. military operation ordered by Clinton. None of the editorials insisted that the U.S. must obtain Security Council approval before undertaking a military action, nor did they require that military operations – unilateral or multilateral – be authorized by new Security Council resolutions.

When the editors criticized the Clinton administration, it was for being too dovish, not too hawkish.

And then, for some reason, it changed! Hypocrophobia strikes deep. Or as Mickey Kaus wrote a couple of months ago:

Pinch's overarching, original crime: Freeing a respected national newspaper to become an unashamed cocooning organ of New York liberal political and aesthetic prejudices (with a few exceptions, like Miller, that are slowly being corrected).

Meanwhile, Stephen F. Hayes looks at Saddam's Terror Training Camps:

THE FORMER IRAQI REGIME OF Saddam Hussein trained thousands of radical Islamic terrorists from the region at camps in Iraq over the four years immediately preceding the U.S. invasion, according to documents and photographs recovered by the U.S. military in postwar Iraq. The existence and character of these documents has been confirmed to THE WEEKLY STANDARD by eleven U.S. government officials.

And will all quickly go down the collective Memory Hole of the New York Times and the rest of the legacy media, another inconvenient fact that just doesn't support the current narrative.

Update: Jeff Goldstein has some thoughts on postmodernism, the infinite malleability of facts, and the legacy media.