Erasing an errant artist's work from public view

Should a man’s name be erased from the face of the earth? That’s a rhetorical question that came to mind when I read Paul Mirengoff’s post in Powerline, based on a story in the San Jose Mercury News, that Minnesota Public Radio has removed all of Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion” and “The Writer’s Almanac” broadcasts from its website. Forty years of work, vanished!

As the Mercury News’s David Vossbrink writes, “This evokes [George] Orwell’s 1984 and the Memory Hole where unwanted or inconvenient history, documents and stories are regularly incinerated.”