Garrison Keillor has been disappeared into the Memory Hole. If you look for his biography or the archived shows from a half century of “A Prairie Home Companion” on the website of Minnesota Public Radio since his fall from grace, you’ll now find only this: “Sorry, but there’s no page here.”

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Kevin Spacey was developing ‘House of Cards’-themed merchandise Keillor and his entire body of work from “A Prairie Home Companion” and “Writer’s Almanac” have been effectively erased from the archives of MPR, along with the work of all the other storytellers, singers, poets and production staff who made the shows successful.

In these tumultuous days of unceasing revelations of sexual scandals in media, politics and business, media enterprises especially face a new ethical challenge with their fallen stars: What do you do with history and art?

Keillor allegedly crossed the line for inappropriate sexual behavior, though we actually don’t yet know what that line is since we’ve only heard Keillor’s side of the story. But MPR’s response is also over the line.

They eliminated everything associated with Keillor. This evokes Orwell’s “1984” and the Memory Hole where unwanted or inconvenient history, documents and stories are regularly incinerated.

In “1984,” that was government’s response. In real life, Kevin Spacey, acting as a high-level government official, was fired from “House of Cards.” That was easy, as were the firings of news stars including Matt Lauer, Bill O’Reilly and Charlie Rose. Those were proportionate and overdue disciplinary decisions.

However, Spacey’s movies still remain available, as are those that Harvey Weinstein produced. If Hollywood were to follow MPR’s Memory Hole model, we would also lose “The Usual Suspects,” “American Beauty,” and “L.A. Confidential.” We would lose “The English Patient,” “Shakespeare in Love” and “Pulp Fiction,” and hundreds of other movies and television shows.

We don’t really want that to happen. The internet is already fragile, brimming with rotten links and ephemeral websites. And when news organizations are bought out or go bankrupt, as was the case most recently with The Gothamist, the work of reporters disappears, a loss to a community’s understanding of its past.

We’re already on the brink of another Dark Age if we don’t figure out how to preserve our records, our stories and our cultural history when new technical platforms and machinery can no longer read our digital footprints. We don’t need to accelerate that trend with deliberate erasures like MPR’s actions.

As consumers of news, entertainment and art, we should be able to choose what we want to watch. If you’re uncomfortable with the work of sleazy movie stars, celebrities and producers, then you can ignore them. That shouldn’t be MPR’s call.

By the Memory Hole standard, we wouldn’t have much history or culture to choose from our collective pasts. Too many artists and politicians from other eras have been pigs, though their art and their decisions live on. We should be able learn from their histories.

We learn, too, from debates about confederate monuments and the whitewashing of history, and how we handle the paradoxes of Thomas Jefferson as a slave-holding champion of liberty, Christopher Columbus as a bold and brutal explorer, and Robert E. Lee as traitor and war hero.

Should we delete Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence because he owned slaves and took sexual advantage of Sally Hemings?

Minnesota Public Radio has every right and a duty to discipline Garrison Keillor for violating its standards. But sweeping away everything he touched was a disproportionate response that penalizes many innocent people who produced and performed for “A Prairie Home Companion.” It’s another step on a discouraging path to a hollowing out of our common heritage and culture.

David Vossbrink recently retired as communications director for the city of San Jose.