Partha Mazumdar vs. John Leo

Guess who won?

John Leo has a fine column in the US News & World Report, dated May 19, concerning the Jayson Blair brouhaha:

The New York Times has acted honorably in dealing with the wreckage of the Jayson Blair scandal. It published corrections, 54 in all, on Blair's inaccurate reporting. When at last it became obvious that Blair was plagiarizing, making up quotes, and filing stories from places he never visited, the Times applied pressure and Blair resigned. At this writing, the Times is preparing a long article detailing Blair's checkered career. This is the way newspapers are supposed to behave -- put it all out on the table....

Everybody knows that this argument tends to trigger cries of "Racism!" So let's stipulate: The overwhelming majority of plagiarism cases and journalistic scandals have been the work of whites. As a reminder, look who is back in the news -- Stephen Glass, retired fabricator of gripping but totally false news stories for the New Republic.

But once you create preferences, you run the risk of increasing the number of screw-ups among the preferred group. Relaxing standards or pushing an unprepared candidate into a high-pressure job tends to increase the odds of trouble. All of us figure this out rather quickly when the preferred group is relatives of the boss or people who went to the boss's college. It's true of identity groups as well....

Partha Mazumdar weighs in on Leo's column over at Jumping to Conclusions, commenting specifically on the third of the paragraphs I quoted above:

.... It's a cute little 'stipulation' on Leo's part, but it just doesn't wash. Blair isn't being accused of failing to meet standards that were relaxed for him. He has been accused of a crime. Leo knows this and plagarism is what he's been talking about until this paragraph. But then he equates standards with crimes. We have to throw away what Leo has written, unless he wants to rewrite his piece to "once you create preferences, you run the risk of increasing the number of plagarisers and criminals among the preferred group." Is that what he meant? If he did, you see why I don't buy his stipulation....

Actually, it is Mazumdar's reading of Leo that doesn't wash. Leo is not equating standards with crimes. He's talking about two different aspects of this situation, and it is quite clear that he is doing so. Mazumdar is conflating the two, and blaming Leo for having done so.

On the one hand is the "crime" to which Mazumdar refers: Blair's malfeasance. On the other is the standards to which Leo refers: the criteria by which the Times decides whom to hire, whom to promote, whom to assign to what. Blair is accusing the Times of relaxing standards unfairly, not accusing Blair of failing to meet them (in which he did fail, of course, but that's not what Leo's talking about in the paragraph in question).

By the way, as far as I know, Blair has not been accused of any crime. In what jurisdiction is plagiarism, or fabrication, or misquotation, a crime?

P.S. The standards for writing and thinking at Jumping to Conclusions used to be very much higher: that was when David Nieporent was the only contributor. I am starting to think the blogroll needs to be pruned again.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Mon. 05/12/03 10:30:41 PM
Categorized as Media.

"Builders and Defenders"

A thought-provoking article by Michael Totten at OpinionJournal today, which made a splash in the Blogosphere recently when it appeared on his blog. I'm not sure I agree with it all, but it's an interesting analysis:

.... It's easy to find writers on both the left and the right who lack historical knowledge. But I find this far more often on the left. This is not a partisan point I'm making. I've been on the left forever, and I have no reason whatever to shill for the right. I have little interest in what National Review says about labor unions, taxes, abortion, the death penalty or the environment. I read those articles occasionally because I need balance, and sometimes the magazine makes good points. But I rarely agree as a whole no matter how well-written the article. The pieces on Iraq, though, are indispensable. The Nation has nothing informed or accurate to say on that subject. Its writers usually ignore it completely. And because they ignore it, because they don't study it, when they do pipe up they tend to get everything wrong....

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Mon. 05/12/03 06:53:12 PM
Categorized as Social/Cultural.

Times' Editors and Church's Bishops

I was just starting to think about this myself, when I came across Patrick Sweeney's blog:

Let me be the first to say there's a parallel between the scandal of truth at the New York Times and the scandal of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.

it's not a scandal of individuals but an institutional scandal.

the people at the top have a self-serving view of their accountability.

the scandal's discovery was facilitated by people outside the institution.

red flags raised inside the instituion were ignored.

the impulse is to put the scandal behind us as quickly as possible.

In fairness to the Times, this appears to be an isolated case rather than a pattern. And financially, this is insignificant to the Times.

I'd add another item to the list: the people at the top will never admit what the real problem is.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Mon. 05/12/03 01:06:36 PM
Categorized as Social/Cultural.

"The Real Scandal of Iraqi Relief"

Thanks to Margaret for calling to my attention another article from Jonathan Foreman in Baghdad, this one in the New York Post yesterday:

They come from all over the world. Their supposed mission is to help the people of Iraq. Their concerned frowns and even their clothes all proclaim the message: "We're the good, caring people... and you're not."

But if actions speak louder than words, then many of the international charitable organizations called NGOs (non-governmental organizations) here are less interested in doing good works than in moral posturing and haranguing the army that won a war most of them opposed....

One wonders if we might encounter reporting like this in the august pages of the nation's newspaper of record if they didn't have to assign so much staff to try to clean up the mess made by one of their fiction reporters. But one rather thinks not.

See also "Bad Reporting in Baghdad".

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Mon. 05/12/03 11:57:20 AM
Categorized as International.

Barbara Amiel vs. Margaret Drabble

In reply to Margaret Drabble's anti-American bilge last week, the London Telegraph runs a column by Barbara Amiel today:

Margaret Drabble went haywire on these pages last week. Her state was, she told us, "almost uncontrollable". She deceived herself. It was out of control....

One is tempted to call this visceral anti-Americanism "the Drabble syndrome", but she is neither the first nor the most prominent sufferer. You could as easily call it the Pinter syndrome and it certainly is the BBC syndrome....

If you watch the BBC for any 24 hours, you see institutionalised anti-Americanism. When Mayor Ken Livingstone told schoolchildren that President George Bush was "everything repellant in politics… venal... corrupt" [report, 10 May], the BBC's commentary was concerned only with how badly this would affect tourism in London - as if there was nothing substantially wrong in the remarks themselves....

The BBC has no idea that it has a bias. But in its anti-Americanism, as in its stand on a number of other issues (ranging from abortion to membership in Europe or the moral equivalence between the actions of suicide bombers and those of the Israeli army), there is nothing in its mind to be decided. If a dissenting view has to be presented, it will always be put in a defensive position.

The canard of choice among those voicing anti-American views is to claim to distinguish between Americans and the administration of George Bush, suggesting the latter is unrepresentative of the people. Every BBC interviewer relies on this, as did Drabble, Astee and Livingstone. But Mr Bush enjoys a popularity rating of more than 65 per cent among his countrymen.

The dislike of the United States has several components, including jealousy of its superpower success, dismay over America's eclipse of European economic and political influence, and unhappiness with a certain vulgarity in American culture. But the primary antagonism springs from the fact that British and European institutions - including the BBC and most of the media - are now firmly in the hands of the statist Left, with its slavish adherence to all the shibboleths of Left-liberalism....

See "I Loathe America, and What It Has Done to the Rest of the World".

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Mon. 05/12/03 08:53:02 AM
Categorized as International.

I Still Want To Know

How many other made-up stories has the New York Times published?

If you have a couple of spare days, read the New York Time's 7,000-word explanation of how they let an effective short-story writer successfully disguise himself as a news reporter on their staff for four years.

.... Two wounded marines lay side by side at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda. One of them, Jayson Blair wrote, "questioned the legitimacy of his emotional pain as he considered his comrade in the next bed, a runner who had lost part of his leg to a land mine in Iraq."

The scene, as described by Mr. Blair in an article that The Times published on April 19, was as false as it was riveting. In fact, it was false from its very first word, its uppercase dateline, which told readers that the reporter was in Bethesda and had witnessed the scene. He had not.

Still, the image was so compelling, the words so haunting, that The Times featured one of the soldier's comments as its Quotation of the Day, appearing on Page 2. "It's kind of hard to feel sorry for yourself when so many people were hurt worse or died," it quoted Lance Cpl. James Klingel as saying.

Mr. Blair did indeed interview Corporal Klingel, but it was by telephone, and it was a day or two after the soldier had been discharged from the medical center. Although the corporal, whose right arm and leg had been injured by a falling cargo hatch, said he could not be sure whether he uttered what would become the Quotation of the Day, he said he was positive that Mr. Blair never visited him in the hospital.

"I actually read that article about me in The New York Times," Corporal Klingel said by telephone last week from his parents' home. "Most of that stuff I didn't say."

He is confident, for instance, that he never told Mr. Blair that he was having nightmares about his tour of duty, as Mr. Blair reported. Nor did he suggest that it was about time, as Mr. Blair wrote, "for another appointment with a chaplain."

Not all of what Mr. Blair wrote was false, but much of what was true in his article was apparently lifted from other news reports. In fact, his 1,831-word front-page article, which purported to draw on "long conversations" with six wounded servicemen, relied on the means of deception that had infected dozens of his other articles over the last few months....

See How Many Other Made-Up Stories Has the New York Times Published?

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Mon. 05/12/03 08:41:21 AM
Categorized as Media.

"For Whom; the Spam Tolls"

Thanks to the bloggers who wrote e-mails of consolation and sympathy concerning spam. I see we are not alone.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Mon. 05/12/03 08:29:26 AM
Categorized as Other.