http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/t...gotten-ruling/
Quote:
The pianist Dejan Lazic, like many artists and performers, is occasionally the subject of bad reviews. Also like other artists, he reads those reviews. And disagrees with them. And gripes over them, sometimes.
But because Lazic lives in Europe, where in May the European Union ruled that individuals have a “right to be forgotten” online, he decided to take the griping one step further: On Oct. 30, he sent The Washington Post a request to remove a 2010 review by Post classical music critic Anne Midgette that – he claims — has marred the first page of his Google results for years.
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Quote:
Now, at least in Europe, there’s a sense that personally involved individuals are somehow furthest from bias, somehow closest the truth.
“I so often listen to a concert, and then the next day read about it in the newspapers — read something that is simply too far from the truth,” Lazic complained. “This is something I, as an artist, am seeking and looking for my whole life: the truth.”
Never mind that such an attitude torpedoes the very foundation of arts criticism, a pursuit that even Lazic says makes us “better off as a society.” Never mind that it essentially invalidates the primary function of journalism, which is to sift through competing, individual storylines for the one that most closely mirrors a collective reality. Or that it undermines the greatest power of the Web, as a record and a clearinghouse for our vast intellectual output.
“I can’t imagine that journalism would have to abide by such strictures,” Midgette said. “Once something is in a paper, it’s a matter of public record, and then it’s on the record for better or worse; isn’t that so?”
It’s so in the United States, at least. But Europe seems to have different priorities for truth.
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Details at the source.
There's an old saying that people are entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts. That may no longer be true everywhere.
This was, of course, inevitable.
I suppose authors will be lining up next to get bad reviews expunged.