Category: journalism

BBC accused of deep bias in its coverage of Gaza/Hamas war (guess which side got demonized more).

September 12, 2024 • 11:45 am

It’s hard to tell which mainstream media outlet is the most biased against Israel when covering the war, but if I had to choose it would be two British sites: the Guardian and the BBC.  Now, an article in the Torygraph (shown below) reports on a new analysis of the Beeb’s behavior in just the four months following the Hamas massacre of October 7. The report concludes that the outlet violated its own guidelines for impartiality over 1,500 times in just those four months. The Torygraph report is echoed in another report in the Times of Israel, which you can read for free pieces by clicking on the second headline below. But it’s sufficient to read the first piece, as it’s longer and more comprehensive.

You can read the Torygraph piece by clicking below, but if it’s paywalled, you can find it archived here. The whole report on the BBC, called “The Asserson Report,” is here, and if you want to judge its veracity, go have a look, though the pdf is 200 pages long.

The breaches of impartiality, which show a pattern of excoriating Israel and downplaying Hamas’s terrorism, involve not only biased reporting (see bar graph below) but also the use of biased reporters and material on the BBC’s Arabic channel. The main analysis involves reporting analyzed by AI for the use of certain words, like “genocide,” but it goes beyond that.

An except:

The BBC breached its own editorial guidelines more than 1,500 times during the height of the Israel-Hamas war, a damning report has found.

The report revealed a “deeply worrying pattern of bias” against Israel, according to its authors who analysed four months of the BBC’s output across television, radio, online news, podcasts and social media.

The research, led by British lawyer Trevor Asserson, also found that Israel was associated with genocide more than 14 times more than Hamas in the corporation’s coverage of the conflict.

On Saturday, Danny Cohen, a former BBC executive, warned that there was now an “institutional crisis” at the national broadcaster and called for an independent inquiry into its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war.

. . . .The Asserson report analysed the BBC’s coverage during a four-month period beginning Oct 7, 2023 – the day Hamas carried out a brutal massacre in southern Israel, killing around 1,200 people and taking another 251 into Gaza as hostages.

A team of around 20 lawyers and 20 data scientists contributed to the research, which used artificial intelligence to analyse nine million words of BBC output.

Researchers identified a total of 1,553 breaches of the BBC’s editorial guidelines, which included impartiality, accuracy, editorial values and public interest.

“The findings reveal a deeply worrying pattern of bias and multiple breaches by the BBC of its own editorial guidelines on impartiality, fairness and establishing the truth,” the report said.

It also found that the BBC repeatedly downplayed Hamas terrorism while presenting Israel as a militaristic and aggressive nation.

It claimed that some journalists used by the BBC in its coverage of the Israel-Gaza conflict have previously shown sympathy for Hamas and even celebrated its acts of terror.

The report claims that a number of BBC reporters have shown extreme hostility to Israel, including BBC Arabic contributor Mayssaa Abdul Khalek, who is said to have called for “death to Israel” and defended a journalist who tweeted: “Sir Hitler, rise, there are a few people that need to be burned.”

. . . the report’s analysis of BBC coverage found that Israel was associated with war crimes four times more than Hamas (127 versus 30), with genocide 14 times more (283 versus 19) and with breaching international law six times more (167 versus 27).

Here’s a figure showing the disproportionality in the BBC’s coverage of Israel vs. Hamas.  Given that Hamas has explicitly endorsed genocide and commits far more war crimes and violations of international law than does Israel, the longer blue bars are a palpable indication of bias in reporting:

The Torygraph article goes on in this vein, and of course reports that Jewish groups are extremely concerned, as are some politicians—even former Labour party members (e.g., Lord Austin of Dudley, now an independent) and Tories like Julia Lopez, the shadow culture secretary, and Sir Oliver Dowden, the shadow deputy prime minister.

One matter of concern is the Beeb’s dogged reluctance to label Hamas as a “terrorist group”. The Times of Israel says this:

The report found that, though the BBC said in October that it would describe Hamas “where possible” as a “proscribed terrorist organization,” Hamas’s designation as a listed terror group was only noted 3.2 percent of the time.

The BBC, of course, disses the Asserson report:

A BBC spokesman said: “We have serious questions about the methodology of this report, particularly its heavy reliance on AI to analyse impartiality, and its interpretation of the BBC’s editorial guidelines. We don’t think coverage can be assessed solely by counting particular words divorced from context.

Well, the bar graph above clearly shows there’s something worth investigating, and if you’ve actually read the BBC on the war, as I have, you’ll see that yes, they’re clearly biased against Israel. For example, the BBC was one of the first to jump the gun when a misfired Islamic Jihad missile hit the parking lot of Al-Ahli hospital, blaming the “hit” on Israel. The reporting journalist, international editor Jeremy Bowen, wouldn’t apologize (though I think the BBC did).

The BBC also had to apologize when Israel sent Arabic-speaking doctors and others into Al-Shifa hospital to help evacuate the patients. That was a gesture of humanity, but the Beeb (and Reuters) said, wrongly, that the IDF was targeting Arabic speakers and medical personnel in the hospital.  These are two cases I remember, but I’m sure the report gives more. At any rate, read the report  if you’re concerned. The BBC apparently repeatedly jumped the gun, and in a way that falsely accused Israel.

A bit more:

The report identifies 11 cases where it claims BBC Arabic’s coverage of the war has featured reporters who have previously made public statements in support of terrorism and specifically Hamas, without viewers being informed of this.

The report accuses Mr Bowen, one of the BBC’s most respected journalists, of bias against Israel, in breach of the corporation’s editorial guidelines.

Mr Bowen, who is taking part in a BBC Masterclass on “reporting war impartially” next week, is accused in the report of “excusing Hamas terrorist activities” and of “stressing the callousness of Israelis”.

These are not just words, but incidents.  The article concludes with more incidents involving both Bowen and Lyse Doucet, the BBC’s chief international correspondent, who’s accused of downplaying the October 7 massacre

Well, the results are no surprise to me, but the fact that a 200-page report on bias in a major media outlet was even created is surprising. I haven’t looked at whether the Beeb itself has reported it, but they should. It’s news, Jake.

The Times of Israel report (click headline below) largely echoes the Torygraph, but there are a few items quoted in the report that the ToI mentions (one is above) but the British paper doesn’t.

“Sir Hitler, rise” indeed!

I wonder what a study of the New York Times or Washington Post would show. . .

How the Washington Post and the New York Times practice abysmal journalism about the Middle East war

March 6, 2024 • 10:00 am

Within about a month of each other, two articles came out discussing how America’s most prominent liberal newspapers—the New York Times and the Washington Post—have both abjured proper standards of journalism when covering the Israel/Hamas war. (Further, the other day the Torygraph wrote about how the BBC does the same thing.) And, of course since all three criticized venues are on the Left, their biases run in the same direction: towards Hamas or Palestine and against Israel.

The first headline below is from conservative National Review, and you can read it by clicking on the headline below or reading it archived here.   The second headline is from Quillette, and you should be able to access it directly by clicking on the second headline.

The articles differ slightly, with criticism of the Post dealing with its direct biases in reporting, while that of the NYT, written by a historian, showing its abysmal understanding of Middle East history, which, coincidentally, makes Israel look bad. (It’s clearly not a coincidence, as the distortions always fit the liberal narrative.). I’ll just give one or two examples of bias from each article because you can read them yourself.

This, from the WaPo, is a bad one, verging on blood libel against Israel. But there are lots of other examples that I’ll pass over:

Once more, three days after the Post’s flawed military analysis [denying Hamas’s use of hospitals as headquarters], a team of the outlet’s senior reporters, including its Istanbul and London bureau chiefs, wrote about Israel returning dozens of Hamas bodies recovered in northern Gaza.

The IDF initially brought the bodies back to Israel to determine whether they were in fact Israeli hostages. The IDF then returned those bodies it had identified as Hamas fighters.

In its report on the body return, the Post cites a statement from the “Hamas-run government media office,” advancing the well-worn antisemitic conspiracy that the Jewish state had “stolen” the organs of slain Palestinians and “mutilated” their bodies. The Post quoted the ministry as saying, “After examining the bodies, it is clear that features of those killed had changed greatly in a clear indication that the Israeli occupation had stolen vital organs from them.”

“The media office denounces in the strongest terms the Israeli occupation army’s disdain for the dignity of the bodies of our 80 martyrs that Israel had stolen during its genocidal war because it delivered them mutilated,” Hamas said.

“The claims could not be independently verified,” the Post wrote of the Hamas-ministry reports. “The IDF referred questions about the bodies to the Israeli agency for civilian coordination with the Palestinians, which did not immediately respond.”

Virtually all other reputable news outlets — Reuters, Barrons, the French wire service AFP, and the Times of Israel — decided not to lend any credibility to the preposterous allegation. But not the Post. The outlet stood alone in airing Hamas’s antisemitic conspiracy. Outlets across the broader Middle East such as the Yemen Press Agency, Al Jazeera, Iran Press, and Al Mayadeen English were not so circumspect, joining the Post in advancing Hamas’s claims.

“It’s factually absurd. They’re harvesting organs from dead terrorists who’ve been lying around for days?” Reed Rubinstein, deputy associate attorney general for the Trump administration, said. “For years, there has been, primarily in academia and Palestinian propaganda outfits, this claim that the Israelis are harvesting organs.”

“It evokes the worst of the blood libel; ‘taking the blood from little children’ kind of stuff which is still recycled to this day,” Rubinstein continued. “The fact that the Post would publish this, and that somehow it got by the editors, is frankly a damning indictment of the operation over there now.”

The “blood libel” claim Rubinstein refers to is a centuries-old antisemitic conspiracy theory that holds that Jews use the blood of non-Jews in religious ceremonies. The ancient smear has in recent years morphed into the claim that Israel routinely harvests the organs of oppressed peoples: When Israel established a hospital in Haiti in the wake of that country’s 2010 earthquake, allegations that the IDF service members staffing the hospital had illegally procured patients’ organs to sell for a profit went viral.

Reached for comment, a Post spokesperson did not explain why the outlet chose to include Hamas’s blatant antisemitic conspiracy mongering in its coverage while most other reputable international outlets disregarded the remarks.

Yes, the Post had no comment, but it would probably say they were just “raising the possibility” that Jews stole the organs of dead Hamas fighters. The whole accusation is palpably ridiculous, even more so given that the bodies that supposedly provided organs had been dead for days.  You don’t “raise the possibilities” when they’re as stupid as this—not unless you want to sow doubt in the minds of Israel-haters. So it goes.

The Quillette article below is by the distinguished and reliable Israeli historian Benny Morris.

Morris analyzes a discussion in the NYT Sunday Magazine by six people (you can read it for yourself, archived here), and calls out most of the participants for arrant historical ignorance. His intro:

As we saw from the savage Hamas assault on southern Israel on 7 October, the Palestinians have certainly been active protagonists in their more-than-century-long battle against Zionism and Israel. But the New York Times would have it otherwise. Indeed, the underlying narrative in their magazine piece of 6 February 2024, “The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and the Long Shadow of 1948,” is that the Palestinians have always lacked agency and have no responsibility for anything that has befallen them over the decades. This, plus a welter of factual errors and misleading judgments, has produced a seriously distorted description of the history of the first Arab–Israeli war and its origins.

The Times article consists of a lengthy “discussion” between Arab and Jewish scholars (three ostensibly from each side) and comments and clarifications (and mis-clarifications) by Emily Bazelon, the NYT staff writer who moderated the dialogue and put the piece together. Five of the six people involved can hardly be deemed experts on either the Arab–Israeli conflict or the 1948 war. Only one—Itamar Rabinovich, a former Israeli ambassador to Washington—has published works of some relevance: The Road Not Taken (1991), on the clandestine post-1948 Arab–Israeli peace talks, and The War for Lebanon (1984), on the Israel–PLO war of the early 1980s. During the discussion, the three Arab panellists—Nadim Bawalsa, an associate editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies; Leena Dallasheh, who is writing a book on Nazareth in the 1940s and ’50s; and Salim Tamari, a sociologist from Bir Zeit University in the West Bank—almost uniformly toe the PLO (or Hamas) line, which is indistinguishable from propaganda.

Bazelon, the moderator and staff writer for the NYT Magazine, seems to make repeated mistakes, and I’ll give one example below. First, though, a trope Bazelon uses several times:

Bazelon comments that in 1929 the “Palestinians rebelled” against the British and “violence first broke out over control of the holy sites in Jerusalem.” (Throughout the New York Times piece, Bazelon uses the phrase “violence broke out,” instead of explicitly stating that the Arabs assaulted the Jews, though she does concede that in 1929 Jews were massacred in Hebron and Safad).

The “violence broke out” phrase would be funny if it wasn’t so pathetic. The article is replete with mistakes, but here are two more excerpts:

Towards the end of the panel discussion, Bazelon asks: why did the Palestinians reject partition in 1947? This is the crux of the issue since their rejection of partition then is arguably the reason why the Palestinians do not have a state to this day. The panellists offer a variety of misleading answers. Abigail Jacobson, a historian at Tel Aviv University and one of the three Jewish participants, argues that the Palestinians could not accept a resolution that earmarked 55 percent of Palestine for the Jews, who only comprised a third of the country’s population, while the Arabs—two-thirds of the population—were only awarded 45 percent of the land. “If you were a Palestinian,” she asks her readers, “would you accept this offer?” But Jacobson forgets that most of the land assigned to the Jewish state was barren wasteland in the Negev Desert. She also elides the basic truth, which is that the the real reason the Palestinian leadership opposed the resolution was that they opposed the grant of any part of Palestine—no matter how small a percentage of the land—to Jewish sovereignty. In their view, all of Palestine, every inch, belonged solely to the Palestinian Arabs. Jacobson argues that “the Palestinian national movement was ready to accept the Jews as a minority within an Arab state.” That is correct. But the point is that they were only willing to accept them as such.

The “real reason” still holds: the Palestinians don’t want two states because they want Israel gone, and they might tolerate Jews in a majority-Palestinian state, but that’s unlikely since there are few Jews remaining in any Arab state. Jews in a Palestinian-majority state would most likely be doomed.

And once again Bazelon flaunts her ignorance:

Finally, the article’s meagre treatment of the 1948 War is itself fraught with errors. Take Bazelon’s introductory paragraph describing the war’s second half. Her first sentence is correct: “On May 14, Israel declared itself a state.” But then she adds, “The next day, the British began leaving, and Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq attacked the new state, later joined by Jordan.” This sentence contains no less than three basic errors. Firstly, the British had already begun their staggered withdrawal from Palestine in December 1947, and had lowered the Union Jack on 14 (not 15) May, though some small British units remained in the north of the country until the end of June 1948. Secondly, Lebanon never attacked Israel. And thirdly, Jordan participated in the pan-Arab invasion of 15 May, rather than joining “later.”

Three errors in one sentence, and Bazelon was wrong, as you can check.  Now this description of history isn’t all that consequential, but it shows a lack of fact-checking and of knowledge, as does the entire article. There’s a longer passage about something more important—the participation of Palestinians in the Second World War—but I’ll leave that for you to read.

I no longer get war news—or at least believe war news—from the NYT or the Post, but go first to the Times of Israel. Yes, it’s an Israeli paper, but I find it to be more accurate, and less likely to jump the gun, than American liberal media. And access is free.

The BBC apologizes for making false and defamatory claims about the IDF executing Palestinian civilians

January 11, 2024 • 12:30 pm

I believe I mentioned this faux pas by the BBC earlier today, but here are the hard, cold facts.

On Christmas Eve, BBC radio repeated, six times, a completely false report that Israeli troops had executed 137 Palestinian civilians and buried them in unmarked graves. This of course came from a notice by the ever-reliable Hamas, which loves to fabricate such stuff.  Eventually the BBC corrected itself (see below), but this shows the willingness of its journalistic chowderheads to lap up and regurgitate to the public whatever saucer of cream Hamas sets before them.  The BBC and the Guardian, it seems, are doing the absolute worst and most biased reporting on the Israel/Hamas war among all mainstream media.

Click below to read the archived report, which of course isn’t in the BBC online but in the Times of London.

The story:

The BBC has apologised for reporting Hamas claims that the Israeli army was responsible for carrying out “summary executions” in the Gaza strip without seeking sufficient corroborating evidence.

The broadcaster has issued an apology via its website for the Christmas Eve report, which is understood to have aired six times on the BBC World Service and Radio 4 before being pulled.

The story, which appears to have been based on a report from the news agency AFP [Agence France-Presse], centered on a statement from the Hamas terror group. It accused Israeli troops of illegally killing 137 Palestinian civilians since the war started on October 7 and burying them in a pit in northern Gaza.

The BBC said that it had failed to “make sufficient effort to seek corroborating evidence to justify reporting the Hamas claim”.

It added that its accusations were attributed and its story contained a response from the Israeli military saying that it was unaware of the incident and that Hamas was a terrorist organisation that did not value truth.

Some staff considered that by posting the report on its corrections and clarifications web page, the BBC had not gone far enough to rectify its mistake.

“Unless this apology is public and broadcast in the same arena as the original mistake, the damage is done,” said one Jewish employee.

A second staffer added: “They have taken the Hamas line — a terror organisation — at face value, far too much since October 7. And nothing has changed. And again it’s an apology about a very serious accusation against Israel hidden on a corrections page.”

The BBC has previously apologised for a television report that Israeli troops had targeted medical staff during a raid on a hospital in Gaza in November.

The previous month it had admitted that it was wrong of one of its correspondents to speculate that that a rocket that fell outside al-Ahli hospital in Gaza had been fired by Israel.

So there you have it: a completely bogus report, originating from Hamas, that the BBC apologized for because it didn’t do “due diligence”. But crikey, the story sounds so fishy from the outset—the IDF doesn’t really do stuff like that—that serious fact-checking would be required. Apparently there was none, just a lifting of the story from the AFP followed by an online apology that was so hard to find that reader Jez, who saw the Times story, had to sniff all around the BBC website, using various permutations of words like “Gaza” and “apology” to even find the apology.

Well, he finally did, and it’s below (click the link to see it, though I reproduce it in full):

Anyway, here it is in full:

I agree with the Times: this apology has to be broadcast (preferably six times) on the same radio station where the false report appeared.  And “they didn’t make sufficient effort to seek corroborating evidence”? They appear to have made NO effort!  How many people who heard the original radio report will even know about this correction?

Fortunately, the Times did the BBC’s work for them, also mentioning how the Beeb had falsely reported the Hamas line two times before this.  In the end, it shows the BBC’s anti-Israel and antisemitic tilt, something that becomes more evident every day.

Business Insider keeps bashing Neri Oxman for plagiarism. This time they’ve got her.

January 8, 2024 • 9:30 am

Two days ago I called attention to the crusade by the site Business Insider, of all places, against Neri Oxman, the wife of gazillionaire and Harvard-basher Bill Ackman. Ackman, you’l recall, was instrumental in the resignation of Harvard President Claudine Gay.  He had called attention to her lame performance before the House committee, and also said he would no longer donate to Harvard until it got rid of its antisemitic climate. Bit was Ackman’s repeated emphasis on Gay’s academic plagiarism that finally helped bring her down.

For some reason, Business Insider (BI) decided to examine the plagiarism not by Ackman, but by his wife, apparently as a way to get back at Ackman for attacking Gay (at least, that’s my theory, which is mine).  In two hit pieces (here and here), BI had found four instances in Oxman’s MIT Ph.D. thesis in which, while citing sources properly, she didn’t put quotation marks around the copied material. That is a technical violation of MIT’s code of conduct, and so, according to their lights, she plagiarized. Oxman admitted she erred, apologized, and asked MIT to correct the four excerpts lacking quotation marks.

Although Oxman was a professor at MIT, she left for good in 2021, so this doesn’t affect her career at all.  While it is grounds for criticism, it’s hardly relevant any more, and is surely not as important as Gay’s plagiarism, which was more widespread, arrant, and occurred in her published papers, which is more serious. Further, Gay was President of Harvard, and must be held to the highest standards, so her resignation for plagiarism was appropriate.

However, BI has kept digging, for they’re relentless. (The glee with which they revealed Oxman’s plagiarism was palpable, and they brought up other irrelevant stuff, like a present she gave to Jeffrey Epstein, to smear her in a way that seemed inappropriate.)

But this time BI struck pay dirt. As the article below shows (click on screenshot, or find it archived here), Oxman did something less palatable this time: she plagiarized at least 15 times in her thesis from Wikipedia, without any citation or attribution, as well as from two other sources. In addition, two of her published papers appear to have lifted material as well, also without either an inline citation or quotation marks. These are more serious matters:

Quotes from BI are indented, and I’ll give two examples of the Wikipedia plagiarism.

Neri Oxman, a former MIT professor and celebrity within the world of academia, stole sentences and whole paragraphs from Wikipedia, other scholars, and technical documents in her academic writing, Business Insider has found.

. . .But a thorough review of her published work revealed that Oxman’s failure to cite sources went beyond that — and included multiple instances of plagiarism in which she passed off writing from other sources as her own without citing the original in any way. At least 15 passages from her 2010 MIT doctoral dissertation were lifted without any citation from Wikipedia entries.

The instances of plagiarism BI found on Friday are closer to a more common definition of plagiarism — the use of someone else’s words without any indication that you are passing them off as your own.

Here are two examples, and the copying is almost word for word. WHY would anyone plagiarize from Wikipedia? And it’s hard to see this as just an error, since there are neither citations to the site nor quotation marks.

Others are shown, but the point is made. There are fifteen in toto, and that’s not good.

She also lifted an illustration:

But Oxman never acknowledged having pulled from Wikipedia. She didn’t just lift text, either: She also took an illustration from the article for “Heat flux” without citing a source, despite requirements in the image’s Creative Commons license to credit where the picture came from.

I’ve sometimes used Wikipedia illustrations without citing the Creative Commons License, but found out about the need for that only recently and will cite that unless the photo info says you don’t have to cite the source of the picture licensed by CC.

Some plagiarism from other papers in her thesis, without attribution or quotation marks:

Wikipedia wasn’t the only resource she cited without attribution in the paper that earned her a doctorate. In a footnote, she used 54 consecutive words without attribution from the website of the design-software maker Rhino to explain what a “Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline” is. She also used technical language about tessellations that matched language from the website Wolfram MathWorld — which, again, she didn’t cite.

And plagiarism in Oxman’s published papers, again without attribution, at least in some cases.

She plagiarized both before and after she received her Ph.D. in 2010. Of three peer-reviewed papers reviewed by BI, two — 2007’s “Get Real: Towards Performance Driven Computational Geometry” and 2011’s “Variable Property Rapid Prototyping” — also contained plagiarism.

The 2011 paper included more than 100 words exactly as they appeared in the 2005 book “Rapid Manufacturing: An Industrial Revolution for the Digital Age,” without quotation marks, citation, or a mention in Oxman’s bibliography. She pulled material from “Path planning of functionally graded material objects for layered manufacturing,” a 2004 paper by M.Y. Zhou, without mentioning it in her bibliography. And she included two verbatim sentences from the 1999 book “Functionally Graded Materials: Design, Processing and Applications” without quotation marks or an in-line citation, though the work is mentioned in her bibliography.

The 2007 “Get Real” paper pulled language describing tensors — an algebraic concept that includes scalars and vectors — from an earlier-published work, the “CRC Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics.” In a 2010 paper, “Per Formative: Towards a Post Materialist Paradigm in Architecture,” that was not peer-reviewed, BI also found another instance of plagiarism, with Oxman using chunks of language from publisher Da Capo Press’ description of “The Modern Language of Architecture” by Bruno Zevi.

So yes, her plagiarism is now more extensive and more serious in nature than before. But again, it carries no consequences for her since she’s not in academia.  If these cases are substantiated, Oxman should apologize and correct both her thesis again as well as the published paper.

There’s no apology yet, just a couple of tweets from Oxman and Ackman. I have to admit that she has a sense of humor.

But Ackman, who is apparently very angry at BI, is now vowing to examine possible plagiarism in academics not just at MIT, but everywhere in America. Oy!

The upshot: Yes, Neri Oxman plagiarized in her thesis and some published papers. It’s more serious than before, but again, she will suffer no consequences, though her reputation has been a bit sullied.  It’s still not the equivalent of what Gay did, as it’s lesser in extent, mostly in a Ph.D. thesis, and, most important, Gay held an important and symbolic academic position.

I’m not excusing Oxman, for she transgressed. But there’s little more to be done than to extract her apology and corrections of her copying. But as for Ackman, the guy seriously needs to chill!

Bill Ackman’s wife Neri Oxman accused of plagiarism, admits guilt

January 6, 2024 • 11:30 am

Bill Ackman, you’ll recall, is the billionaire who helped bring down Harvard President Claudine Gay. First he chastised her for her performance before the House committee, calling out the antisemitism that occurred at Harvard on Gay’s watch. Then he announced that he would no longer donate to Harvard until they cleaned up their act. Finally, when Gay’s plagiarism in her scholarly papers came to light, he bored down on that, and kept doing it until she resigned as President.  There’s little doubt Ackman’s his stream of tweets about Gay promoted her resignation by calling everyone’s attention to Gay’s missteps and embarrassing the board of Harvard Overseers, which is Gay’s boss.

As I’ve said repeatedly, I think Gay shouldn’t have resigned until the evidence of plagiarism surfaced. Her remarks about antisemitism to the Representatives were wooden and unempathic, but a First-Amendment construal of Harvard’s speech code would indeed have deemed cries for genocide of the Jews as “conditional”. Sometimes it’s legal, and sometimes not. The problem was that Harvard doesn’t have a First-Amendment-based speech code, and it applied its own code unevenly, giving rise to hypocrisy.  However, I would have given her a chance, for if she’d implemented something like Steve Pinker’s “fivefold way”, Harvard would have greatly improved.

In the end, her plagiarism, which also called attention to a rather thin academic resumé, brought her down, and made me agree that she should resign.

Now, however, Ackman is somewhat hoist with his own petard, for his wife, Neri Oxman, a designer and a professor at MIT until 2021, stands accused of plagiarism herself.  It doesn’t seem quite as bad as Gay’s missteps, for Oxman, in her dissertation, did cite the sources of her information. What she failed to do, however, was put quotation marks around phrases and paragraphs she lifted from cited sources, and that’s a violation of MIT’s own plagiarism code.

Business Insider (BI), in the first two articles below, found examples of her plagiarism, and you can see that BI can barely contain its joy of catching an Ackman-adjacent person in the act of plagiarism. It’s almost tabloid journalism.

Click on either to read. The third article is a summary from CNN.  In the end, Oxman admitted guilt and said she’d correct the quotations, but Ackman is pushing back against the charges, vowing reprisal against both MIT and BI while not denying what Oxman did. But since Oxman is no longer at MIT, she has no academic job to lose.

Click below or find this article archived here:

Again, click below or go to the article archived here:

And from CNN, not paywalled.

The accusation (from BI):

The billionaire hedge fund manager and major Harvard donor Bill Ackman seized on revelations that Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, had plagiarized some passages in her academic work to underscore his calls for her removal following what he perceived as her mishandling of large protests against Israel’s bombardment of Gaza on Harvard’s campus.

An analysis by Business Insider found a similar pattern of plagiarism by Ackman’s wife, Neri Oxman, who became a tenured professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2017.

Oxman plagiarized multiple paragraphs of her 2010 doctoral dissertation, Business Insider found, including at least one passage directly lifted from other writers without citation.

. . .An architect and artist who experiments with new ways to synthesize materials found in nature, Oxman has been the subject of profiles in major outlets such as The New York Times and Elle. She has collaborated with Björk, exhibited at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and had paparazzi stake her out after Brad Pitt visited her lab at MIT in 2018.

There are two kinds of accusations. First, that Oxman “self plagiarized”, using her own writing in her dissertation word-for-word in her published papers. That’s okay, and isn’t really plagiarism because a dissertation isn’t published, and in most cases is intended to be turned into papers. Thus, BI’s statement below isn’t incriminating:

She also recycled phrasing she used in her dissertation in subsequent papers. The opening paragraph of her dissertation, for instance, appears almost word-for-word in an article she published in 2013. While re-using material isn’t a formal violation of MIT’s academic-integrity code, a guide to “ethical writing” recommended by the university to its scholars and students warns against it.

Self-plagiarizing isn’t a good habit if you use the same phrases or paragraphs in one paper after another, but “plagiarizing” from a dissertation into a paper is not at all a violation. I suspect MIT’s dictum here refers to using your own words repeatedly in published work. And that’s not what Oxman did.

The evidence:

Then there are the other cases, in which Oxman did cite her original sources but also used big chunks of wording from them—without quotation marks. That’s a no-no, but it’s not as big a no-no as what Gay did, which was lift chunks of prose and then not include her using proper citations.

Here are a couple of examples of how Oxman used wording from previously-published papers in her thesis. Notice that she does cite the sources in parentheses, though:

and one more:

The MIT academic integrity code (below; click to enlarge) says that even though sources are cited, this is a no-no. But remember, this is plagiarism in a dissertation, not in a published paper. I’ve circled the bit that Oxman violated:

Oxman apologized for these errors in a tweet, though she couldn’t verify one of the accusations because the source was online. She’s going to get MIT to correct the citations. BI notes:

Neri Oxman, the wife of billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, admitted to failing to properly credit sources in portions of her doctoral dissertation after Business Insider published an article finding that Oxman engaged in a pattern of plagiarism similar to that of former Harvard president Claudine Gay.

BI identified four instances in Oxman’s dissertation in which she lifted paragraphs from other scholars’ work without including them in quotation marks. In those instances, Oxman wrote in a post on X, using quotation marks would have been “the proper approach for crediting the work. I regret and apologize for these errors.”

. . .Oxman wrote on X that after she has reviewed the original sources, she plans to “request that MIT make any necessary corrections.”

“As I have dedicated my career to advancing science and innovation, I have always recognized the profound importance of the contributions of my peers and those who came before me. I hope that my work is helpful to the generations to come,” she wrote.

Oxman now leads an eponymous company, Oxman, focused on “innovation in product, architectural, and urban design,” she wrote on X. “OXMAN has been in stealth mode. I look forward to sharing more about OXMAN later this year.”

I don’t know how MIT will correct these errors, because I don’t think most Ph.D. theses are online (mine certainly isn’t). If it is they can fix it, but perhaps they’ll just append the corrections in her thesis that reposes in MIT’s library.

If you read the Business Insider articles, they come off as hit jobs, as if somehow they’re joyfully getting back at what Ackman for what he did to Claudine Gay by showing that Ackman’s wife did the same thing. But Oxman didn’t do the same thing: she is guilty of not using quotation marks around quotations taken from an attributed source in a dissertation. Gay, on the other hand, is guilty of not using quotation marks around unattributed quotations, and doing this in published papers, not in a dissertation.  Further, Oxman is no longer a professor at MIT, and was never dean or president of any university, so it’s not such a big deal. Yes, she should have cited sources correctly, but in the end the damage is minor. Her missteps are far more excusable than Gay’s. But they are missteps, and academics need to know what constitutes plagiarism.

Business Insider keeps mentioning Ackman in their two pieces, which of course is what gives this story its legs, but BI also adds superfluous material to make both Ackman and Oxman look bad, like this:

In 2019, emails uncovered by the Boston Globe showed Ackman pressured MIT to keep Oxman’s name out of a brewing scandal over an original sculpture she gave to Jeffrey Epstein in thanks for a $125,000 donation to her lab.

So what? This is irrelevant to the story, and is pretty much of a smear.

As for Ackman, he’s not denying that his wife did what BI accused her of, but is standing by her nonetheless (see the linked tweet below):

Her husband, Ackman, lauded her transparency in his own post on X following the publication of Business Insider’s article.

“​​Part of what makes her human is that she makes mistakes, owns them, and apologizes when appropriate,” he wrote.

However, this empathic stand is weakened by Ackman’s threat to examine the writings of Business Insider staff for plagiarism:

. . . and he’s going after plagiarism at MIT, too!

The guy is combative, that’s for sure! It’s not seemly for him to strike out at everybody, trying to find plagiarizing skeletons in their closets. Gay is gone; Oxman admitted fault and will correct her writing. It’s time to move on!

Here are Oxman and Ackman from NBC News; the caption is from NBC:

h/t: Greg Mayer

Another NYT writer resigns in lieu of being fired

December 19, 2023 • 10:45 am

Another writer for the New York Times, one who had accrued numerous accolades, resigned after having signed her second petition staking out a political position. As the NYT itself reported below, its Magazine writer Jazmine Hughes decided to resign from the paper after discussions with management. (She would have been fired had she not left.)

Click to read:

An excerpt from the article:

Jazmine Hughes, an award-winning New York Times Magazine staff writer, resigned from the publication on Friday after she violated the newsroom’s policies by signing a letter that voiced support for Palestinians and protested Israel’s siege in Gaza.

Jake Silverstein, the editor of The New York Times Magazine, announced Ms. Hughes’s resignation in an email to staff members on Friday evening.

“While I respect that she has strong convictions, this was a clear violation of The Times’s policy on public protest,” Mr. Silverstein wrote. “This policy, which I fully support, is an important part of our commitment to independence.”

Mr. Silverstein said Ms. Hughes had previously violated the policy by signing another public letter this year. That letter, which was also signed by other contributors to The Times, protested the newspaper’s reporting on transgender issues.

. . . The petition Ms. Hughes signed about the Israel-Hamas war was published online last week by a group called Writers Against the War on Gaza. The group, which describes itself as “an ad hoc coalition committed to solidarity and the horizon of liberation for the Palestinian people,” denounced what it described as Israel’s “eliminationist assault” on Palestinians as well as the deaths of journalists reporting on the war. It was signed by hundreds of people, including other well-known journalists and authors.

Hughes, who had won a National Magazine Award, was warned after she signed her first petition that doing it again would bring about her termination.  Although the NYT Guild (a union) did try to fight the call to resign, they failed.  If you want to read about all the minutiae involved in this resignation, click below to go to an archived Vanity Fair article describing it:

The creation of journalism policies against signing petitions or making political social-media posts is, of course, intended to preserve the appearance of a reporter’s objectivity, and has intensified during the racial and political turmoil of the past few years.  I’m in favor of such restrictions, as it helps keep the news unbiased—or at least helps keep readers from thinking that the news is biased by a reporter’s politics:

The October 7 Hamas attack on Israel and monthlong war in Gaza has led to heated clashes across college campuses and social media. It has also renewed debates inside media companies over staffers expressing personal views in a public setting, a point of tension that has flared before around issues of racial justice and abortion. Some news organizations, including Vanity Fair parent Condé Nast, have recently sent emails reminding staff of their social media policies. Publishing giant Hearst Magazines went a step further last week with a new social media policy that “warns staffers that even ‘liking’ controversial content could result in their termination, and encourages telling on colleagues who post content that could violate the rules,” according to The Washington Post.

Now, as we learned the other day in a discussion about James Bennet, another NYT staffer who was fired (this time unjustly), there is no leeway for straight news reporters to express political opinions in public, a little more leeway for op-ed writers, and magazine writers are somewhere in the middle:

At one point, according to two sources familiar with the conversation, Hughes asked Silverstein about severance, citing the union contract provision that says there is a severance package if it is a mutual resignation. Silverstein said this did not apply to her, according to a source familiar. Hughes learned she would not receive any severance, and only walked away with her paid time off and health care extended through the end of the month. Hughes emailed a letter of resignation a few minutes after 5 p.m. on Friday. Within the hour, she received a call from a Times media reporter, who was writing an article about her resignation.
Hughes wasn’t an opinion writer, in which case, according to the Times’s own editorial standards, she would have “more leeway than others in speaking publicly because their business is expressing opinions,” though opinion writers are still expected “to consider carefully the forums in which they appear and to protect the standards and impartiality of the newspaper as a whole.” But she was a magazine writer who, as opposed to a straight news reporter, could be expected to inject a point-of-view or first-person perspective into her work. Hughes, who is Black and gay, has tackled race and identity in her work; she won an award from the Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists for a Times magazine story revisiting her experience coming out. [Hughes is black and gay.]
While there is no such stated provision for Times magazine writers, Times staffers I spoke to noted that writing in the magazine has by nature been more open to commentary than the news pages. “But it’s still part of the Times paper and ultimately still answers to Joe Kahn,” as one puts it. The executive editor and his deputies have made it clear to staff that it is not acceptable to publicly align with an advocacy group or criticize colleagues’ work. “Under this current masthead,” another Times staffer notes, “there has never been less tolerance for this.” Especially at this moment, when the Times has been under a microscope for anything related to the Israel-Hamas war. “The context here is huge,” a third staffer says, “and that letter took a direct swipe at the Editorial Board.”

The “direct swipe at the Editorial Board” is probably not just her signing the petition, which makes no bones about supporting Palestine, but also that the petition both mentioned the NYT as complicit in biased reporting and encouraged other writers to sign on:

At the same time, we must reckon with the role words and images play in the war on Gaza and the ferocious support they have engendered: Israel’s defense minister announced the siege as a fight against “human animals”; even as we learned that Israel had rained bombs down on densely populated urban neighborhoods and deployed white phosphorus in Gaza City, the New York Times editorial board wrote that “what Israel is fighting to defend is a society that values human life and the rule of law”. . .

. . . We call on all our colleagues working in cultural institutions to endorse that boycott. And we invite writers, editors, journalists, scholars, artists, musicians, actors, and anyone in creative and academic work to sign this statement. Join us in building a new cultural front for a free Palestine.

Had Hughes not signed a petition that accused her employer of whitewashing Israel, she probably wouldn’t have been fired. But she knew exactly what she was doing and what would happen to her.

In my view, anti-petition-signing and social-media policies are valuable for venues that purport to do objective reporting, for without them any remaining trust in journalism would be lost. As for the NYT, these policies should apply to both news reporters and magazine writers, and not necessarily to op-ed writers, whose job is, after all, giving their opinions.

h/t: Enrico

NYT publisher responds to James Bennet’s accusations

December 18, 2023 • 9:15 am

Yesterday I discussed a very long article in The Economist (17,000 words!) by New York Times op-ed editor James Bennet, who was fired from the paper (“euphemistically: “asked to resign”) after publishing an op-ed piece by Republican Senator Tom Cotton.  Cotton’s piece called for bringing in the military should post-George-Floyd demonstrations turn violent, and Times staffers (and the general public) said that such a wicked op-ed made them feel “unsafe.”

Bennet went into detail about how he was first supported by NYT publisher A. G. Sulzberger and executive editor Dean Baquet, but when the ranks of Offended Staff grew too numerous and too loud, Bennet had to go.  The hypocrisy of the spineless Sulzberger is stunning, but Bennet also describes why the NYT has become so biased and woke, and how its editorial stance—”progressive”—has crept into both the news and the Sunday Magazine.  It was a scathing indictment.

Sulzberger had recently published a long take on his ideal of journalism in The Columbia Journalism Review (I haven’t read it, but found it here), yet apparently his ideals are quite at variance with the reality of the paper he heads.  Here, for example, is Sulzberger’s last paragraph in that essay:

It is Americans themselves who will need to insist that there is a future for independent journalism. Amid all the distraction, confusion, and chaos of the digital world, it’s more important than ever that citizens develop relationships with news organizations that inform and challenge them, commit to finding a daily place in their lives for independent journalism, and use it to expand, not merely reinforce, their worldview. If the press holds fast to journalistic independence, I am confident that over time more people—of all backgrounds and perspectives—will come to see the value of journalists serving as fair-minded guides through a complex world at a consequential moment.

“Fair-minded guides” and “expanding rather than reinforcing a worldview” is the opposite of the tendentious reporting that Bennet described, and you can vouch for the paper’s bias simply by reading it.

Now, however, apparently stung by Bennet’s piece, the Mighty Sulzberger has replied to the criticism in the pages of his very own paper. Click below to see his short NYT response:

Here’s his response in its entirety:

James Bennet and I have always agreed on the importance of independent journalism, the challenges it faces in today’s more polarized world, and the mission of The Times to pursue independence even when the path of less resistance might be to give into partisan passions.

But I could not disagree more strongly with the false narrative he has constructed about The Times.

Our commitment to independence is evident in our report every day. Whether in the wars in Europe and in the Middle East, the turmoil on college campuses, or the political mood of the country on the eve of another election year, our 2,000 journalists are breaking stories, holding the powerful to account, and seeking to shed light rather than heat on the most divisive issues of our time, regardless of whom our coverage might upset.

Our readers now also have the benefit of an Opinion report that has grown in size and ambition since 2020 and has only expanded upon its commitment to exploring a wide range of viewpoints. Today we have a far more diverse mix of opinions, including more conservative and heterodox voices, than ever before.

James was a valued partner, but where I parted ways with him is on how to deliver on these values. Principles alone are not enough. Execution matters. Leadership matters.

This is hogwash.  The opinion section is still largely (at least 75%) pretty Left, there are only a couple of conservative columnists, and remember what I quoted yesterday from Bennet:

The Times’s failure to honour its own stated principles of openness to a range of views was particularly hard on the handful of conservative writers, some of whom would complain about being flyspecked and abused by colleagues. One day when I relayed a conservative’s concern about double standards to Sulzberger, he lost his patience. He told me to inform the complaining conservative that that’s just how it was: there was a double standard and he should get used to it. A publication that promises its readers to stand apart from politics should not have different standards for different writers based on their politics. But I delivered the message. There are many things I regret about my tenure as editorial-page editor. That is the only act of which I am ashamed.

And here’s Bennet’s description of how he parted ways with the paper:

Like me, Baquet seemed taken aback by the criticism that Times readers shouldn’t hear what Cotton had to say. Cotton had a lot of influence with the White House, Baquet noted, and he could well be making his argument directly to the president, Donald Trump. Readers should know about it. Cotton was also a possible future contender for the White House himself, Baquet added. And, besides, Cotton was far from alone: lots of Americans agreed with him—most of them, according to some polls. “Are we truly so precious?” Baquet asked again, with a note of wonder and frustration.

The answer, it turned out, was yes. Less than three days later, on Saturday morning, Sulzberger called me at home and, with an icy anger that still puzzles and saddens me, demanded my resignation. I got mad, too, and said he’d have to fire me. I thought better of that later. I called him back and agreed to resign, flattering myself that I was being noble.

Given that Bennet was forced to leave is hardly under question, and the fact he was asked to leave makes hash of Sulzie’s protestations.  A publisher should have spine enough to stand up to the staff’s and social media’s outcry. For if you read Cotton’s editorial, you’ll find that it’s neither odious nor harmful—it’s simply a conservative view that many in America shared. But it was HARMFUL

It’s also telling that Sulzberger’s response to Bennet does not contest any of Bennet’s facts, but simply glowingly affirms how wonderful and dedicated the NYT is. It’s an exercise in back-patting, not self defense. Pardon me if I believe Bennet rather than Sulzberger.

h/t: Rosemary