Dutch newspaper wipes out articles citing fabricated sources - Internet Archive to the rescue!
Shortly before Christmas, Dutch daily newspaper Trouw removed 126 articles from its website. These articles were all authored by Perdiep Ramesar, a former journalist of the newspaper. Ramesar had been fired by Trouw in November, after it turned out that many of the sources that are cited in his articles were fabricated. The most notorious example was a series of pieces about the so-called “Sharia Triangle”, a neighbourhood in the city of The Hague, which Ramesar claimed was being ruled by Sharia law. As it turned out, this story was largely based on fabricated sources. Nevertheless, it was taken at face value by most major Dutch news outlets at the time, and even prompted a parliamentary debate.
Trouw’s decision to remove the 126 articles overnight was met with considerable criticism. For example, historian Jan Dirk Snel noted that the removal of these articles makes it impossible to check what was wrong with them in the first place. Various other critics accused Trouw of trying to rewrite history.
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