Vogue piece on Assad’s wife disappears

It may have been the worst-timed, and most tin-eared, magazine article in decades.

-- And then the story disappeared.

The 3,200-word article apparently proved so embarrassing to the magazine that it scrubbed it from its Web site, an almost-unheard-of step for a mainstream media organization and a generally acknowledged violation of digital etiquette.

Today it’s impossible to find the article, “A Rose in the Desert,” on Vogue’s Web site. Links to it lead to a notice on Vogue.com reading, “Oops. The page you’re looking for can not be found,” next to a photo of a fashion model looking sternly into the camera.

Buck’s story is still available on the subscribers-only Nexis database, which archives published articles and broadcast transcripts. According to the Atlantic magazine, the only freely available copy of “A Rose in the Desert” is on a Web site maintained by a Syrian journalist
(President­assad.net, which calls Bashar al-Assad “the President of a Just & Comprehensive Peace”). The site is based in Syria, which places it beyond the reach of Vogue’s owner, Conde Nast.