---
title: "A Reader Found The Hole In Our Reasoning. We Were Wrong."
dek: "We removed four labels last week and defended it on the grounds that a reader is never in doubt. One correspondent pointed out where that fails: a screenshot of a document travels without the page around it."
kind: editorial (Editorial)
desk: Opinion
author: Verity Ashcombe-Doyle (fictional)
published: 2026-09-04T13:00:00Z
url: https://theyburied.com/article/editorial-one-line-under-the-masthead
tags: labelling, the vault, editorial, corrections
genre: satire
status: fiction — nothing in this story happened; every person, source and document is invented
---

# A Reader Found The Hole In Our Reasoning. We Were Wrong.

*We removed four labels last week and defended it on the grounds that a reader is never in doubt. One correspondent pointed out where that fails: a screenshot of a document travels without the page around it.*

This newspaper removed four of its five fiction labels last week. We gave a reason at the
time and we still think most of it holds: four warnings on a single page is not four times
the honesty of one, and a reader who has scrolled past three of them is not reading the
fourth.

A reader has now shown us where that reasoning breaks, and it is not where we were
looking.

Ignatius Fairweather-Sunda writes, in our letters column today, that the label we should
have kept is the one on the Vault documents. His argument is short and we cannot get round
it.

An article looks like an article. Whatever else it is, it arrives framed — masthead above
it, byline on it, footer under it. A document does not. We have spent a year making our
Vault pages look precisely like real archival material: reference numbers, chains of
custody, transcription notes, the marginalia of a real filing system. That was the point.
It is also the problem.

A screenshot of an article carries enough of the page to be identifiable. A screenshot of
PX-1207 carries a document, and now carries nothing that says what it is.

We did not weigh that properly. The letter is right and the removal was, in that one place,
a mistake.

So: the line is going back on the Vault documents, and it is going back in a form that
survives being cropped — set into the document furniture itself rather than floated
underneath it, where it will appear in any screenshot that includes the reference number.

We are not restoring the other three. We do not think the red bar was doing work that the
`noindex` instruction and a blanket `robots.txt` are not doing better, and we think the
per-article reminder was shouting at people who had already agreed.

Ottoline Baszczuk-Ferrand, also in today's letters, makes a second point we have no answer
to yet: that the red bar was bad because it was *loud*, not because it existed, and that a
single quiet line under the masthead would have cost almost nothing. That is a design
question rather than a principle, and design questions are the ones this newspaper is
worst at answering quickly. We are looking at it.

What we are not going to do is what a certain kind of publication does at this point,
which is to announce that after listening carefully we have decided we were right all
along.

We were not right. We were right about three of four, a reader found the fourth, and the
fourth is the one that mattered most.

---
They Buried is a satirical newspaper. Every story, source, document and person in it is invented. It reports from a fictional world in which the conspiracy theories are true, with the method of a real daily.