According to this brief article in Editor and Publisher, The New York Times website has pulled the cartoons of award-winning cartoonist and author Ted Rall, because the cartoons offended some of the website’s more conservative readers.

Now, newspapers and websites shuffle their cartoonists and columnists all the time, but what’s really troubling about what the Times has done is that they have taken Rall out of their archives. It’s as if he never existed!

The fear that newspapers would edit the past was one of the big concerns voiced in the 1990s when newspapers started going online. Many editors said that this sort of thing would never happen — that they would never stand for it. And yet now, at the publication that sees itself as the leading news outlet of the free world, it’s already started to happen.