Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly I can almost imagine a way to arrive at this conclusion without it being shifty (although no idea what the case actually is here). If you're going to debunk an article about something like a lack of vaccine safety and need to retract a couple of sentences later, but the overall conclusion is the same, then the conspiracists will be right on you with a diff of the changes from the archive trying to piece toge…
That is a good thing. I want to see those changes. Preventing people from seeing the change log of a page because "conspiracy theorists might use it" is dangerous thinking. Saying that it's okay to forego transparency because it could be used to bolster people who disagree with you is backwards. That's precisely why transparency should be retained - when you're the person disagreeing, it benefits you.
Later in the day, they changed the headline to be something like "Insurgents invade Capital building", but did not change the 10AM timestamp up top. One had to read the article to find the update timestamp.
Newsmaxx, and thus many if its viewers looked at the headline and headline timestamp and trumpeted "how did they know?! It's a conspiracy!"
I had to look into the wayback machine to see the original headline to show to a relative who'd bought the Newsmaxx narrative. I'm not sure they totally believed or even understood what I was telling them, but I am certain it raised some doubt.
All of that would was unnecessary, if only NPR had done proper change management on its articles.