Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Here’s a tweet I found from the NYT:
Single women own and occupy more homes than single men in the U.S., despite earning only about 83 cents for every dollar that men earn, according to a new study. Here's a look at where the ownership gap is greatest and smallest across the country: https://t.co/4MyhC1kin0 pic.twitter.com/op9XbaFwRY
— The New York Times (@nytimes) February 3, 2023
Here is the full headline. What is wrong with the top three lines? This is what I’d call a really stupid mistake!
There’s no longer any doubt that one of the main missions of Scientific American involves not the dissemination of science, but pushing a “progressive” Democratic ideology on its readers. What this has to do with science is beyond me. In fact, it has nothing to do with science; it has to do with the editor, Laura Helmuth, publishing op-ed after op-ed that agrees with her own political views, as evidenced by her tweet below. My own offer to write an op-ed arguing against the infusion of ideology into science was rejected by Helmuth, so there’s no pretense that the magazine welcomes a diversity of opinion.
Here’s one tweet, which points to the op-ed below it:
People fighting against affirmative action have long used pseudoscientific "race science" as justification https://t.co/5x0ORaOuXi by @stacyfarina & K Amacker @sciam
— Laura Helmuth (@laurahelmuth) October 31, 2022
This is the article, which you can read by clicking on it (you may have to sign in, but it’s free). While I agree that we need some form of affirmative action (but dither in my mind about the nature of that action), I disagree that venues like Scientific American should be taking stands like this, as well as refusing to consider arguments at odds with their own op-eds. After all, many who push against affirmative action (John McWhorter is one example) do NOT use “race science” (aka “scientific racism”) to justify their stand:
This article immediately brings up white supremacy as a prime mover of opposition to affirmative action, despite the fact that a majority of all ethnic groups asked (white, black, Hispanic, and Asian) say that race should not be a factor in college admissions. Are these minority opponents also white supremacists? A quote from the piece:
Scientists play a crucial role in assuring equitable access to colleges and universities. Education is fundamentally an issue of human rights, and affirmative action in admissions is one tool in a larger strategy to address social injustices and shape the future of scientific research. Yet white supremacy, whether systemic or interpersonal, is still deeply ingrained in society, leading to financial and social disadvantages for nonwhite students. As scientists, we must fiercely defend affirmative action, if we wish for equity in science and in U.S. society.
The piece also makes the dubious argument that “systemic racism” is baked into science itself. Anyone actually in science knows that this is untrue. Scientists are desperate to hire minority faculty and accept minority graduate students.
As scientists, we need to improve the public’s understanding of systemic racism as an unjust social, political and legal power structure, as well as that there are no innate “deficiencies” in nonwhite people. Clearly, we will need more than 25 years to achieve such a goal.
The piece goes on to rehash arguments about why scientists like E. O. Wilson were racists because they associated with racists, and winds up calling for “centering Black and Brown students in educational law and policy.”
Affirmative action is rooted in the Civil Rights Movement, and its advocates intended to rectify overt and systemic injustices toward Black and brown students. However, leaders of primarily white institutions have altered race-conscious admissions to emphasize the importance of maintaining “critical masses” to promote “diversity” within a primarily white student population. Campus and admissions policies tailored to white students reinforce racial hierarchies and maintain the supremacist ideology that initially prevented Black and brown students from participating in higher education programs in significant numbers. We must center Black and brown students in educational law and policy to maintain and strengthen the original tenets of affirmative action, in addition to upholding it as status quo.
There is no discussion, of course, of course, of lack of equal opportunity as a cause of “inequity”. At the end, the authors (quoting geneticist Joseph Graves) suggest massive reparations in education if affirmative action is overturned. I don’t disagree entirely with their solution below, but, as some readers have suggested, the solution involves far more than throwing money at education, which hasn’t proven that efficacious:
“Should the SCOTUS overturn Grutter v. Bollinger, thus essentially ending affirmative action at historically white institutions of higher education, they must simultaneously order that all states who violated the 1879 Plessy v. Ferguson decision by siphoning funds away from black education to support white education must immediately pay those pilfered funds into black public-school districts and HBCUs. Furthermore, they must order that going forward, a moon-shot level investment in the infrastructure of HBCU/HSI/MSI and Tribal Colleges must be put in place to meet the need for equitable education for non-whites in the United States.”
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In this new article below, the author argues that the Court’s ruling in the Dobbs case upholds white supremacy because people of color suffer more from restrictions on abortion than do whites. I disagree with the Dobbs decision, of course, and am more “pro-choice” than most Americans: don’t think that 6 months of gestation should be the upper limit for allowing abortion. What I disagree with is that that opinion belongs in a science magazine, which also refuses to publish contrary opinions. (Shouldn’t a science magazine, if it does intend to engage in politics, entertain diverse and conflicting points of view?)
Black and Latinx communities proportionally have higher rates of abortion than white people, a consequence of structural and systemic barriers in health care and society more broadly. People of color are making decisions about the future of their families without equitable access to living wages, jobs, and reliable food and housing. Their families face the living legacy of redlining and housing segregation, along with inequities in education access, all of which limit their movement and upward mobility. Mass incarceration and our flawed justice system disrupt families, their participation in the workforce and their contributions to society and voting. Widespread police violence destroys families, and Black parents fear police brutality before their children are even born.
Communities of color deal with barriers to health care and insurance and face racism and discrimination when they seek care, including narratives that blame people for social conditions that were created by the system. Worse yet, Black pregnant people face alarmingly high rates of pregnancy-related deaths in the hands of our health care system. Voter suppression and widespread attempts to disenfranchise communities prevent them from having a voice in transforming these structures that unjustly constrain them. This will beget further laws and restrictions that limit their rights and freedom—a modern manifestation of the separate-but-not-equal ideology of the Jim Crow era.
With these structures in mind—structures that primarily work to perpetuate barriers and poor outcomes for people of color—one thing about the Dobbs decision and the antiabortion movement becomes quite clear: this orchestrated attack on abortion rights sits within the grand plan that this country was built upon—the violent and oppressive maintenance of white supremacy.
I wouldn’t doubt that minorities suffer more from restricted abortion than do white people, but I question whether the Dobbs decision itself, and the people who support, it are motivated largely by white supremacy. There is, after all, the view, motivated largely by religion, that abortion is murder. I disagree with that line of argument, but how can the author psychologize the motivations for abortion opponents and argue for a conspiracy against people of color—a “grand plan based on maintaining white supremacy”—when antiabortion bills prohibit abortion for everyone?
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Finally, should you be in doubt about how to vote next week, Scientific American is here to help you! Click on the screenshot to read:
Their message, in short, is “Vote Democratic”! Again, I agree with many of the authors’ stands, save this claim:
The science on transgender care in youth shows such care is safe and affirming, and that withholding it can seriously harm trans children’s mental health—including increasing their risk of depression and suicide.
The science on transgender health care shows no such thing. We don’t know if puberty blockers are safe (they’ve been relegated to clinical-trial status in some European countries), the science says nothing about the value of “affirmative” rather than more empathic and objective care, and there is no convincing data showing withholding affirmative care (as opposed to giving other inds of care) harms the mental health of children with gender dysphoria (the data that do exist are full of flaws).
Here’s Lee Jussim’s response to editor Helmuth’s tweet about this article.
Govt spending should be up for a vote, and is, indirectly, every election. Editor of Scientific American apparently does not understand how democracy works. NSF & NIH don't have rights to tax dollars w/o consent of the people's representatives. Nor do State U's. Nor should they.
— The Dark Pirate Jussim (@PsychRabble) November 2, 2022
In my view, Scientific American has become pretty much of a joke. Yes, it still publishes science pieces, and some of them are even decent, but it’s taken upon itself the job of pushing “progressive” Democratic politics. Give me a good reason why magazines that are supposed to popularize modern science shouldn’t remain viewpoint neutral on issues of politics, morals, and ideology. They are not, after all, newspapers.
How do readers let it get away with that? Truly, if you still subscribe to this magazine, shame on you.
Well, well, well. . . here we have a big article from the New York Times that touts ghosts, implicitly assumes that they exist and haunt houses, and tells readers how to live with them. Save for one barely noticeable caveat about naturalistic explanations for one “ghostly” phenomenon, you will find no doubt about ghosts, and nothing about investigations of whether they exist. (Ghosts, as you know, are taken to be the returned spirits of people who are dead.)
I’m not sure why the NYT keeps writing about these paranormal phenomena as if they are true, without giving the proper caveats. (e.g., “Note to reader: These are all anecdotal reports. Further scientific investigation has shown no evidence for the dead reappearing.”) It may be because younger folk, possibly the target demographic for the paper, is more credulous about these things. (See below.)
Click on the screenshot to read:
The article gives several anecdotal accounts that have the inhabitants of some houses think that their homes are haunted. I’ll give just one:
Lisa Asbury has lived in her home in Dunlap, Ill., for three years now. But the paranormal activity she’s observed began in her old home in 2018, following the death of her husband’s grandfather, and is identical to what she’s been experiencing now, she said. Ms. Asbury, 43, said that she’s seen objects fly off shelves, lights flash in multiple rooms and fan blades start turning suddenly. “I hear my name being called when I’m alone, phantom footsteps, our dogs barking while staring at nothing,” she added.
But nothing has felt aggressive, Ms. Asbury said. Just attention-seeking. “I believe our spirits to be family,” she said. “I get the feeling that we have different family members visit at different times.”
And though it was unsettling for a while, she’s figured out how to live within the ghostly milieu. “Usually if something occurs, we will acknowledge it out loud or just say hi to the spirit,” Ms. Asbury said.
Notice the advice, mentioned in the article’s title, about how to live with a ghost. Be friendly and maybe your ghost will be friendly too, like Casper:
There are many more examples, but that one will suffice. The paper explains the surprising ubiquity of the belief that one’s house is haunted.
Many Americans believe that their home is inhabited by someone or something that isn’t a living being. An October study from the Utah-based home security company Vivint found that nearly half of the thousand surveyed homeowners believed that their house was haunted. Another survey of 1,000 people by Real Estate Witch, an education platform for home buyers and sellers, found similar results, with 44 percent of respondents saying that they’ve lived in a haunted house.
Crikey! That’s a lot of credulous people. The believers tend to be younger, and the difference in belief between Gen Zers and baby boomers is substantial: almost twofold:
There are generational differences in who believes in ghosts. In the Vivint survey, 65 percent of Gen Zers (defined as people born between 1997 and 2012) who participated in the survey thought their home was haunted, while 35 percent of baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) surveyed thought the same.
Why so many? The paper gives several explanations:
Researchers attribute increasing belief in the supernatural to the rise of paranormal-related media, a decline in religious affiliation and the pandemic. With so many people believing that they live with ghosts, a new question arises: How does one live with ghosts? Are there ways to become comfortable with it, or certain actions to keep away from so as not to disturb it?
Note the implicit assumption that ghosts are real. Here are more explanations, with this one obvious: if ghosts were real, there would be some kind of afterlife:
Sharon Hill, the author of the 2017 book “Scientifical Americans: The Culture of Amateur Paranormal Researchers,” added that “many are no longer fearful of ghosts because we’ve been so habituated to them by the media.”
Haunted houses can also be “a way to connect to the past or a sense of enchantment in the everyday world,” Ms. Hill said. “We have a sense of wanting to find out for ourselves and be able to feel like we can reach beyond death. To know that ghosts exist would be very comforting to some people.”
More explanations:
Gen Z “might be searching for meaning in new places,” Ms. Hill said. “If the modern world they live in isn’t providing food for the soul, if capitalism is a system that drains us of personal enlightenment, it’s not hard to figure out that younger people will search elsewhere for that and find the idea of an alternate world — of ghosts, aliens, cryptids, et cetera — to be enticing to explore.”
The pandemic also played a role in society’s relationship with houses and ghosts.
The salience of death in our culture increased, igniting a desire for evidence of an afterlife for some people. “Think of all the sudden, and often not-sufficiently-ritually-mourned deaths during Covid. Many times people lost loved ones with no last contact, no funeral,” said Tok Thompson, a folklorist and professor of anthropology at the University of Southern California.
. . . Many experts also attribute a decline in religious belief to fostering a belief in the paranormal. A 2021 Pew Research Center survey found that nearly 30 percent of Americans were religiously unaffiliated, 10 percentage points higher than a decade ago.
Why can’t they just become adherents to naturalism instead of to spiritualism manifested as belief in the paranormal?
One note of interest:
Most states don’t mention paranormal activity in real estate disclosure laws, but New York and New Jersey have explicit requirements surrounding it. In New Jersey, sellers, if asked, must disclose known information about any potential poltergeists. In New York, a court can rescind a sale if the seller has bolstered the reputation of the home being haunted and takes advantage of a buyer’s ignorance of that notoriety.
The article adds that having a reputation of being haunted can actually boost the value of a home.
The article gives only one naturalistic alternative to the paranormal mentioned in the entire article:
Quarantine and remote work meant more time at home, which meant more time to notice strange sounds or movements. Some paranormal investigators reported increased calls concerning hauntings.
“People weren’t normally around all the time to notice the normal noises of a house as it heats up from the sun during the day and then cools in the afternoon. With everyone inside, there was even less noise outside to drown out the typical sounds,” Ms. Hill, the author, said.
But of course the phenomena recounted in the anecdotes, including ouija-board stuff and dogs mysteriously appearing outside, aren’t explained by houses heating up and cooling down.
And that’s it for alternative explanations. And the article’s last paragraph serves to buttress the notion that ghosts are real:
Karla Olivares, a financial consultant living in San Antonio, Texas, said that growing up in a house she believed was haunted has made her more accepting of the unexplainable happenings that have occurred in other places she’s lived or visited.
“When I feel something now, I acknowledge it. It’s also made me become more spiritual myself,” Ms. Olivares, 27, said. “Now, I feel that it’s all around me, and I won’t get surprised if I feel something again.”
Well, what can you expect of a paper where an Anglican priest touts God in her weekly Sunday column? Both ghosts and gods are paranormal phenomena, and the NYT has a history of touting stuff like tarot cards, reincarnation and astrology.
FYI, the author of the piece is identified this way:
Anna Kodé is a reporter for the Real Estate section of The Times. She writes about design trends, housing issues and the relationship between identity and home.
There’s no mention of her being conversant with scientific investigation of the paranormal.
h/t: John
Although this might have been going on for a long time, I just noticed it yesterday. Two of the three “MSM” news paper sites to which I subscribe—the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal—are providing “reading times” for most of their articles. See below; I’ve put arrows by the times:
The Wall Street Journal does it, too (for long pieces they just note “long read”):
These times presumably allow a reader to judge whether he or she wants to or has time to read a piece. I guess if the time is too long, you don’t read it.
Of course this raises a number of questions. First, how do they estimate the reading time? Presumably it’s based on the number of words in the piece, divided by a “standard” reading time of words/minute.
I consider myself a fairly fast reader (not always a good thing when I’m reading prose that needs to be savored), so I took one article from the NYT to test the reading time for me. It’s this one (click to read), estimated at 6 minutes reading time.
Excluding the ancillary material at the end, which are notices about other unrelated articles, it took me 2 minutes and 23 seconds. Although I am a fast reader, I am not that fast, and so the timings must be directed at those who read fairly slowly.
The second question is also obvious: Why are the newspapers doing this?
I will try not to be curmudgeonly here (and will fail), but it seems to me that you should choose which pieces to read based on whether their title interests you. If the article engages you, you read on to the end. If it doesn’t, of you have other pressing issues to attend to, you stop reading and move on.
It appears, in an age when there are a gazillion online sites competing for your time, that this is the way some news sites have chosen to help harried readers decide what to read—a way based solely on the title and the reading time. Perhaps that’s better than the alternative of using only the title, but it may be worse than the alternative of reading based on the title and reading the whole article because it’s interesting and informative, or giving up if you’re bored.
But if you’re going to use these times to decide what to read, you have to know your reading speed. How many readers have matched the estimated reading time with their own reading time? Would you choose what to read based on estimated reading times?
I read about this incident (or rather, non-incident) the other day, but Jesse Singal, in a post on Bari Weiss’s site, tells the whole story in detail. The lesson is that when a story appeals to the ideological bias of a newspaper, even if it doesn’t check out, they sometimes print it as if were true, or at least don’t check it out especially thoroughly. It’s especially galling when America’s premier newspaper, The New York Times, falls prey to this confirmation bias, as it did in this story.
Click to read; it’s free and short (but do subscribe if you read often):
The story is one indicting Brigham Young University (BYU) students as racists, supposedly evinced during a volleyball game against Duke University on August 26:
Last month, Rachel Richardson—the only black starter on the women’s volleyball team at Duke University—leveled a shocking accusation. She said that during her team’s August 26 match against Brigham Young University, fans inside the BYU arena in Provo, Utah inundated her with racist abuse and threats.
After the match, 19-year-old Richardson told her godmother, Lesa Pamplin, about the incident. Pamplin is a criminal defense attorney running for a county judgeship in Texas, and was not at the game—but the next day, she published a tweet that rocketed the story to national attention: “My Goddaughter is the only black starter for Dukes [sic] volleyball team. While playing yesterday, she was called a [n-word] every time she served. She was threatened by a white male that told her to watch her back going to the team bus. A police officer had to be put by their bench.”
The tweet is no longer available, but it racked up 185,000 likes before it was archived. LeBron James himself responded: “you tell your Goddaughter to stand tall, be proud and continue to be BLACK!!! We are a brotherhood and sisterhood! We have her back. This is not sports.”
The story was reported widely, most prominently by the New York Times in this story by Vima Patel (click to read):
One student, said to have led the racist insults, was banned from all University athletic venues. The story then spread widely:
The national response to this heinous allegation was swift and righteous. Utah’s governor, Spencer Cox, issued a statement on Twitter (now deleted) expressing his shock and disappointment. “I’m disgusted that this behavior is happening and deeply saddened if others didn’t step up to stop it,” he wrote. “As a society we have to do more to create an atmosphere where racist a**holes like this never feel comfortable attacking others.” For its part, BYU quickly acknowledged that something horrible had happened in the fieldhouse. The day after the game, it published an apologetic statement, saying that the fan deemed responsible for shouting the epithets—who was not a BYU student—had been banned from all university athletic venues.
Unsurprisingly, major media outlets were all over this story. The Times’ coverage set the tone, with the Washington Post and CNN and Sports Illustrated and NPR all publishing similar articles, alongside the predictable think pieces. The incident also had consequences for BYU sports more generally. The head coach of women’s basketball at the University of South Carolina canceled its home opener against BYU. A match between Duke and Rider University’s women’s volleyball teams—scheduled to be played at the BYU arena—was moved to a nearby high school gym in order to provide both teams “the safest atmosphere,” according to Duke’s Director of Athletics, Nina King.
For millions of people watching this story unfold, this was yet another example of the ineradicable stain of American racism, of just how little progress we’ve really made.
Singal, whose reporting I like quite a bit, then adds the four-word kicker.
Except it didn’t happen.
Yes, this was all made up. Completely made up. There is no evidence that any slurs were emitted, that the n-word was used when Rachel Richardson was serving, that there was a cop assigned to sit by the Duke bench, and so on. And it’s not as if there weren’t potential witnesses, either: there were cameras recording the game, cellphones doing the same, and thousands of witnesses. Not a single bit of film documented the assertions, and no witnesses came forward, even with requests to do so by the cops and the newspapers.
It was either a hoax or a massive lie, however you want to characterize it. How was it discovered, then?
Not by any major paper. The Salt Lake Tribune did question whether the right student had been banned, but the whole truth came out via—you guessed it—”a conservative campus newspaper at BYU”, the Cougar Chronicle (BYU is a Mormon school, quite conservative, and has few black students.) Here’s their attempt to get at the truth, done the old-fashioned way: using the phone and shoe leather.
Click to read:
BYU then did its own investigation, and on September 9 issued this statement (click to read):
An except:
From our extensive review, we have not found any evidence to corroborate the allegation that fans engaged in racial heckling or uttered racial slurs at the event. As we stated earlier, we would not tolerate any conduct that would make a student-athlete feel unsafe. That is the reason for our immediate response and our thorough investigation.
As a result of our investigation, we have lifted the ban on the fan who was identified as having uttered racial slurs during the match. We have not found any evidence that that individual engaged in such an activity. BYU sincerely apologizes to that fan for any hardship the ban has caused.
Yet, as often happens during these hoaxes, institutions who were deceived nevertheless must say something that affirms their virtue, so the statement adds this:
Despite being unable to find supporting evidence of racial slurs in the many recordings and interviews, we hope that all those involved will understand our sincere efforts to ensure that all student-athletes competing at BYU feel safe. As stated by Athletics Director Tom Holmoe, BYU and BYU Athletics are committed to zero-tolerance of racism, and we strive to provide a positive experience for everyone who attends our athletic events, including student-athletes, coaches and fans, where they are valued and respected.
This is typical of what happens when a campus “hate crime” is revealed as a hoax—as a substantial proportion of them are. I suggest having a look at Wilfred Reilly’s book, Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left is Selling a Fake Race War. (Reilly, by the way, is black.) I’ve read it, and the stories he tells are dire. I can’t remember the proportion of campus hate crimes or hate “incidents” that turn out to be fake (usually perpetuated by a member of the minority group that was a victim of the fabricated “hate”), but it’s substantial.
What’s telling is what these incidents have in common after they’re revealed as hoaxes. The perpetrators are often not punished, even when they’re caught; the fact that the hate crime or incident was a hoax is not revealed to the college community (this is bad, because it perpetrates the idea that racism is prevalent on campus); these hoaxes happen everywhere, and, after the “crime” is revealed as a hoax, the schools nevertheless continue to insist that it could have been real because racism is everywhere. Finally, the colleges even put in place new antiracist initiatives—simply to show that they’re doing something, even in the face of a hoax. These colleges, like the newspapers, have a substantial ideological investment in perpetrating the idea that racism is ubiquitous.
At any rate, the New York Times also responded with a retraction (below), but also some tut-tutting about the prevalence of racism at BYU. Here’s the retraction:
And Singal’s take on the NYT’s most recent story, which still maintains that the “hate” against the black player happened as described.
By this point, between the original New York Times story and a tepid followup, a combined five reporters and researchers had been pantsed by a small student paper. If all this provoked any soul-searching on the part of the Times, it was unclear from its report on BYU’s findings.
Remarkably, their most recent story treated the events as unresolved: “B.Y.U. did not directly address why its findings contradicted the account by Richardson, and the statements by both universities left questions unanswered.” It also included a statement from Duke’s athletic director saying the university stood by the volleyball team. The story ends with a reminder that at the overwhelmingly Mormon school, less than 1 percent of students are black, and that a recent report highlighted the university’s diversity issues. It’s unclear exactly why this is relevant; the point seems to be for the Times to advertise that it understands racism is a serious problem at BYU, and that even if the school were not guilty of it this time, everyone knows the university’s soul is not entirely spotless.
The lessons are several. People were all too willing to believe a story that comported with their ideological views, especially the view racism is everywhere and “systemic”. But the press bought into it too, abjuring their traditional role in news stories to state the facts and omit anything that isn’t supported by the facts. Further, this shoddy reporting damages people, as well as the public, who are misled by biases. Singal mentions, as examples of similar hoaxes taken seriously by the public and the media without proper vetting, the Covington Catholic High School issue (three media settled with the supposedly “smirking racist” for a substantial amount of money), and the Jussie Smollett case, immediately believed as an incident of racism though Smollett’s claims were ridiculous. And of course the fact that a “hate crime” or a “hate incident” was a hoax is never publicized as widely as the original “transgression” itself, so the public never learns the truth.
Here’s Singal’s conclusion:
. . . there’s an established pattern of journalists being far too credulous when these incidents first burst onto the scene.
It won’t take some radical revolution for journalists to better cover fast-developing, controversial incidents involving race and other hot-button issues. All they have to do is rediscover norms that are already there, embedded in journalistic tradition. The best, oldest-school newspaper editors—a truly dying breed—constantly pester cub reporters to make that one extra call, ask that one extra question, follow that one extra unlikely lead. They do this all in the service of making sure their organization prints the best, most accurate version of the news (and doesn’t get sued). They can adhere to these norms without becoming a shill for the powerful. It’s simply a matter of approaching a story with curiosity and skepticism, of not believing they are the advocate for one side in a conflict—no matter how righteous and obvious the battle lines may seem at first glance.
It’s getting so that one has to turn to Substack instead of the “MSM” to get the real news!
The lesson, then, is one that scientists have long had drilled into them. If a result tends to jibe with your innate biases—with what you want to be true—then that is the time you have to exercise the most doubt and give the results the highest scrutiny.
If you follow National Public Radio (NPR), partly funded by American taxpayers, you’ll know that it’s gone pretty woke. The latest example was called to my attention by a reader who noted a 7-minute interview between NPR host A. Martinez and Kimberlé Crenshaw, one of the big doyens and architects of Critical Race Theory (CRT). Krenshaw was in fact the person who introduced the concept of “intersectionality” into CRT.
There were three things about the interview—you can either read it or listen below—that bothered the reader. First, CRT was presented as a done deal without any issues or criticism, due largely to softball questions by the interviewer. Second, the interview sounded scripted, as if the whole “discussion” had been written down and was being read. (This is a no-no in journalism, but I’m not as bothered by it as by the other two issues.) Finally, Crenshaw tries to fold Martin Luther King into CRT, presenting his views as an early version of CRT when they were nothing of the sort.
But let’s back up. Here’s what the reader sent me:
Thought you might be interested in this. I had on Morning Edition this morning and my jaw just about dropped as I washed my face and heard this. It’s like they did an infomercial for Critical Race Theory. CRT is presented as if it’s a physics formula, an absolute given that it’s 100% correct and nothing controversial, but it’s been hijacked by crazy right-wingers.
It’s mostly an interview with Kimberle Crenshaw, but this “interview” sounds as if it’s literally pre-arranged to make sure she gets to say exactly what she wants. And I do mean “literally.” Do you know how the NPR presenters will often a back-and-forth conversation with one of their correspondents, rather than having the correspondent just report their story? When they do that, it’s very irritating because it’s clear they’re following a script but pretending to have a spontaneous conversation. And that is exactly what this sounded like. I seriously think they had a pre-arranged script with Crenshaw.
I already stopped supporting NPR, so I can’t do it again unfortunately.
The reader added this caveat:
If I’m wrong and this interview was not scripted, that’s almost as bad—because the reporter did nothing but back up Crenshaw and ask leading questions to let her continue giving an infomercial for CRT, rather than asking her any of the many valid questions about the real problems with CRT. He didn’t even try the “some people say this, what do you say to them?” approach. And since Crenshaw is one of the creators of modern CRT, that is bizarre journalism.
Click to read or listen, and note that the title is a simple declarative statement of truth, which is not true when applied to Martin Luther King.
Listen for yourself. The distortion that upset me most was the attempt of Crenshaw, as I said, to pretend that Martin Luther King, Jr. was actually a critical race theorist. Here’s the telling exchange:
MARTINEZ: You wrote an article – an op-ed actually – in the LA Times in January, and the headline is “Martin Luther King Was A Critical Race Theorist Before There Was A Name For It.” [JAC: it’s here but it’s paywalled, and I haven’t read it.] In what way, Professor?
CRENSHAW: Well, in several ways. No. 1, he was a critic of the contradiction between what America says it is, what its deepest aspirations are and what its material reality is. You know, a lot of people like to quote his March on Washington speech, particularly the part where he talks about how our aspiration is to be judged on the content of our character, not the color of our skin. That was his sort of aspirational moment. The rest of the speech was a trenchant critique of the idea that America had given African Americans a rubber check. Basically, the promises of the 13th and the 14th Amendment came back marked insufficient funds. So his entire point of that speech was to make good on the Democratic promises.
Well, I urge you to read the entire “I have a dream” speech (transcript here), paying attention to the “rest of the speech” touted by Crenshaw as expressing CRT. As you might know, there’s been considerable agitation concerning King’s famous statement in this speech that I’ve put in bold below: his aspiration to have all people judged not by their skin color but by the content of their character. That implies that we should stop dividing, judging, and treating people differently based on race; rather, we should judge people by who they are as individuals. He’s calling for universal brotherhood.
That, of course, explicitly contravenes CRT, which makes race and racism the central organizing principle of American society, and insists that people’s views be judged taking race into account as well as being treated differently based on their race. King’s views have discomfited advocates of CRT, and now, as Crenshaw is doing here, they are starting to paint King (and his famous aspiration) as really being an early advocate of CRT. That’s about as wrong as you can get.
First, although the components of CRT, an academic theory, vary among analysts, we need to know its main contentions. I could have used the book Cynical Theories by Pluckrose and Lindsay, which did a very good job laying out the tenets of the theory. Although both authors are opposed to CRT, I thought their presentation of it was quite good, and presented my summary of its tenets here. (Note that the idea of race as a social construct, but one that gives members of a group a unique voice, were not embraced by King.) However, I’ll use the Wikipedia “common themes” of CRT as I suspect they’ve been vetted by advocates of the theory, so we can take them as more or less a definitive summary. Here’s the list (quotes are taken from the article).
Now read King’s speech from the 1963 March On Washington, delivered August 28 at the Lincoln Memorial. I’ve put below not only the words following his famous quote, but do read what goes before as well. It’s these statements that Crenshaw say make Martin Luther King an early advocate of CRT. Emphasis is mine:
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today!
I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of “interposition” and “nullification” — one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.
I have a dream today!
I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; “and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.”
This is our hope, and this is the faith that I go back to the South with.
With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.
And this will be the day — this will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning:
My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrim’s pride, From every mountainside, let freedom ring!
And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.
And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.
Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.
Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania.
Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado.
Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California.
But not only that:
Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.
Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.
Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi.
From every mountainside, let freedom ring.
Those are of course stirring words, but, either before or after the quote in bold, I find very little that corresponds to CRT. Crenshaw tries mightily to drag King into the CRT corral, but what his entire speech consists of is a passionate advocacy of equality—combined with the palpable fact that the founding fathers and people like Abraham Lincoln declared all “men” equal, but that this promise had not been met. There is nothing about intersectionality, standpoint theory, “lived experience,” a critique of liberalism, and so on. What we see is the delineation of a persistent, vicious, and hurtful racism that violates America’s own principles, and a call for brotherhood: for equality, not for separation. And, of course, his famous line underscores that.
If you want to say that those sentiments make King a CRT advocate, then you’re really throwing overboard the tenets of CRT and just asserting that it’s about racism per se and a striving for brotherhood and equality. But that’s not what CRT is about. Other King writings I’ve read and speeches I’ve heard (see a famous example here) don’t materially differ in what they call for, nor bring King closer in philosophy to modern CRT. The only similarity between King and, say, Ibram Kendi, is their emphasis on racism and how to rectify it. But how they portray racism, and the methods they espouse for eliminating it, are completely different. I won’t dwell on this: if you know your Kendi or DiAngelo, you’ll know what I’m talking about.
Antiracists, disturbed by King’s words and especially the bold line above—which in fact accurately expresses his views—have either ignored the disparity with CRT, or, lately, tried to pretend that King and Kendi are two peas in a pod. But over the years I’ve also seen mentions of King diminish, though I expected the opposite during the “racial reckoning.” That’s because his views don’t really jibe with modern ones based on CRT. My correspondent also noticed this:
Yes, the whole thing of claiming MLK was espousing CRT started this past year, and there were at least a couple of very good articles explaining how completely wrong, and knowingly wrong, that is. I didn’t bookmark them or anything but I’m sure you can find by googling if you want to. Before, CRT was trying to play down or erase MLK, and this is their attempt to instead claim he’s one of them. But I was just reading that the California ethnic studies curriculum—I believe it was California—literally doesn’t include him, since until recently, it was easier to ignore him since MLK completely conflicts with CRT. Note no pushback from the interviewer even though this was a well known issue only a little earlier this year.
I found just one of those articles, by Coleman Hughes, and a discussion article here. I also looked at the latest draft of the California ethnic studies curriculum and found a handful of mentions of King as well as of CRT. (Update: there’s more on his relative neglect here, and here.) But King is perhaps the most eloquent and effective African-American of our time with respect to civil rights—a man whose powers helped bring the 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts into being. He deserves a much bigger portion of the curriculum. Oh, and he wasn’t an early exponent of CRT.
As for NPR, well, let’s just say that once again their programming is ideologically slanted, and this time in a misleading way.
******
I’ll finish with a quote from the Coleman Hughes piece (it was written when he was an undergraduate):
With regard to the role that racial identity should play in politics, King was unequivocal: First and foremost we are human beings, not members of races. The verbal tic of modern racial-justice activists—“As a black man . . .”—would sound foreign on his lips. Even when fighting explicitly racist policies, he deployed universal principles rather than a tribal grievance narrative.
“The problem is not a purely racial one, with Negroes set against whites,” King writes of the civil-rights movement in his 1958 essay “Three Ways of Meeting Oppression.” He adds that “nonviolent resistance is not aimed against oppressors but against oppression. Under its banner consciences, not racial groups, are enlisted.”
. . . If we use the adjective “radical” to describe King, then we should follow it with the right nouns. King was a radical Christian, as demonstrated by his commitment to loving his enemies no matter how much they hated him. He was a radical truth-teller, whether that meant telling white moderates that blacks wouldn’t wait any longer to be granted full rights, or telling blacks not to make oppression an excuse for failure. Most important, he was a radical advocate, not on behalf of any subdivision of our species, but on behalf of humanity as a whole.
Tish Harrison Warren, an Anglican priest, has the privilege and pleasure of purveying her palaver on each Sunday’s op-ed page of the NYT. I still don’t know why they want her to write, as she never says anything that makes you think, but simply regurgitates whatever “nice” liberal people will be thinking, with an inevitable nod to God and to the value of prayer. This week she both celebrates and mourns as her kids go off to school, with backpacks blessed by God and with prayers from their mom. As always, her words are trite, her sentiments lacrhymose.
Click to read (if you want).
She is joyful:
As I sent my kids back to school this year, I sent them with my prayers.
I love the beginning of a new school year. I love meeting my kids’ new teachers. I derive over-the-top joy from new school supplies. I savor the excitement my kids have about seeing old friends, meeting new ones, and their plans, goals and hopes for the year. Certain churches, including my own, start each school year with the “Blessing of the Backpacks.” Kids bring their backpacks to church one Sunday in late August and lay them near the altar. Then we as a church pray for students, for teachers and schools in our city. It’s a tactile way of “blessing and sending” our kids into the tasks and challenges that lay ahead and a joyful and moving way to start the year.
Sunrise, sunset. . . . . Is there anything here that’s new, fresh, or thought-inducing?
For me, there is a sense of lament as well. The new school year is also a time when, yet again, I must practice letting my kids go. A mentor of mine whose children are now adults told me that for each new stage they entered, he felt delight and joy, and at the exact same time, he grieved losing the stage before. This is the complex melody of parenting. From the time the cord is cut till your children grow into adults, parenthood is a long practice in loving deeply yet letting go. Over and over again.
But the toughest part about this time of year isn’t merely letting my kids go. It’s that I must let them go into a hard and sometimes heartbreaking world.
But she’s sad and angry as well, for her kids could get shot in the classroom, so she had to importune God about that, too:
A year ago, two friends and I, all mothers, co-wrote a short book of prayers for children. We decided to include a prayer for the beginning of the school day. As we workshopped a draft, we discussed what we should cover in it. It began, “Dear God, Bless our school and our teachers and all of our helpers. Give me courage to be a good friend.” We edited a few more lines about kindness, curiosity and the gift of learning about God’s world. Then, our conversation grew sad and serious. We knew we had to address the need for safety — something so many parents think about as they drop their kids off at school each day. We were writing for 4- through 9-year-olds. How does one possibly address the reality of gun violence with such tiny kids? But how could we ignore it? These tiny kids have lockdown drills. These kids know that violence lurks amid the happiest of lives and classrooms. They know this in a way I did not when I was their age. The prayer ends “And please keep everyone safe all day long.” That’s the best words we could come up with, the best we could offer.
I left that writing session feeling angry, angry that we had to think about mass violence when writing a prayer for second graders, angry that we as a country have failed children, angry at how children live in a world where adults do not keep them safe. It felt wrong because it is wrong.
Of course school shootings are deplorable, especially when they take away lives lived only for a decade or so. But we’ll never be able to stop them completely, even if we completely outlaw guns. Nevertheless, her reveries go on and on and on, repeating themselves and then ending with a request for readers to send in their own school prayers:
How about you? How are you praying for your children or others, teachers, administrators or schools as this new school year begins? Are there particular prayers you use? Or specific rituals or practices that your family embraces this time of year? Share them with me at HarrisonWarren-newsletter@nytimes.com and we will select some responses to highlight in next week’s newsletter. Please be sure to let us know if we have your permission to print your full name and approximate location along with your response.
I was tempted. . . . .but naah.
But I have questions:
a.) Why does the NYT publish this stuff? What are they hoping that readers will get out of it. Is it a form of journalistic comfort food?
b.) Would they publish it if a mom who wasn’t a priest wrote it? Or is there some special cachet given to the words of those who wear dog collars?
c.) Are any of these sentiments worth expressing in America’s most famous newspaper?
Now I’m sure that Rev. Warren is a nice person, not at all like the Reverend Jerry Falwell, but I can’t help but think, when I read stuff like this, that you can get away with an extraordinary fusillade of bromides if you’re a priest. Nothing that Warren says is offensive—unless you don’t like her certainty that there’s a theistic God—but I remember Hitchens’s acerbic remarks about the cachet of religion in America after the death of Falwell:
The empty life of this ugly little charlatan proves only one thing, that you can get away with the most extraordinary offenses to morality and to truth in this country if you will just get yourself called reverend.
The nextavenue site is actually an arm of the Public Broadcasting Service, 15% (or more) of which is funded by the taxpayers via the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. It’s targeted to older adults. As its site says:
Next Avenue is a nonprofit, digital journalism publication produced by Twin Cities PBS (TPT). As public media’s first and only national publication for older adults, we are dedicated to covering the issues that matter most as we age.
And this logo is at the bottom of today’s article, which is about something that doesn’t matter more when we age:
This part-government sponsorship means that taxpayers like me are funding what nextavenue puts out. And what it has put out is a piece promoting the virtues of tarot cards (National Public Radio has done the same thing.) The free article is below; click the screenshot to read.
Of course PBS can’t just say that tarot cards flat-out can predict the future, for its listeners and readers are more sophisticated than that. Still, the article says that prediction is part of what tarot can do—but there’s so much more!
As it turns out, tarot is not just for prediction but to stimulate your mind and explore possibilities you haven’t realized. In other words, as all these articles about tarot in the liberal press maintain, it can be a device for getting you to think about your life and ponder future behaviors. It’s psychology, Jake! I wonder why more psychologists haven’t hit on tarot cards as a professional aid!
I’ll be brief and just quote some of the article’s waffling. This part is straight-out prediction:
People can read tarot cards for themselves or work with an experienced tarot reader. Beginning by focusing on a question is a good idea, even something simple like “What will this week be like?” Then draw a single card and see what it might tell you.
Nancy Antenucci is a St. Paul, Minnesota-based tarot reader in her sixties, founder of the Twin Cities Tarot Collective and the author of two books, “Psychic Tarot” and “Tarot Rituals.” She sees tarot cards as being a language of imagery.
“Sonia Choquette said that we should call intuition ‘pattern recognition,'” Antenucci says. “I totally agree with that. When you’re seeing the cards, all those pictures together, it opens up different patterns. What you’re doing is recognizing the patterns of something.”
While decks usually come with guidebooks to help users understand the potential meanings of each card, Antenucci encourages people to go with their instincts when they pull specific cards. “Every picture is going to strike every person differently, so there’s a lot that can happen across a whole spectrum of personalities,” she says.
That could be called “confirmation bias.” You read things the way you want them to be. But I digress. . . .
Imagine a deck focused on weather conditions across the four seasons. One person might pull a snowstorm card and be delighted — they love winter and snowstorms. But someone who hates winter is going to have a decidedly different visceral reaction. Neither is wrong; each reflects the person drawing the card.
“The biggest misconception is that tarot is only used for prediction,” Antenucci says. “It’s also used for brainstorming, or storytelling, or writing or prompts.”
Here we see the usual excuse: it can be used for prediction, but the cards can also prompt you to tell stories or call up other ideas. But if is to do that, shouldn’t we stop using the traditional decks used for prediction and make new decks with drawings and words inspired by modern psychology? What about Rorshach cards?
Here are Sonia Chouette’s fees, by the way. As far as I know, no therapist charges $1200 an hour.
Further on in the piece, an artist weighs in saying that the cards “can help people see things differently,” and that her drawing students get suggestions inspired by the teacher’s own part-time vocation as a tarot reader.
I won’t go on further. In short, what we see is a taxpayer-funded venue touting the supernatural, but partly hiding it under a bushel labeled “psychology.”
When I read stuff like this, I do wonder whether people attracted by tarot, crystals, and other things have a deep need for the supernatural, one that in other people is satisfied by religion. I often hear people with “belief in belief” argue that religion isn’t vanishing in America, but is simply being diverted into religion-like endeavors, like reading tarot cards. Or being woke. While some of that may be true, I still think that the data show America becoming increasingly secular over time, so that one fine day, when my atoms have become clay, the U.S. will have the religiosity of Scandinavia—hardly any at all.
But grifters gotta grift, so we’ll always have tarot, psychics, and other scammers.
h/t: Ginger K.
This article by Graham Adams comes from The Platform, a fairly recent site that claims to hold all sides to account but is also “anti-woke.” I can’t vouch for Adams’ claims about the poor coverage of important New Zealand events by the country’s media, but other Kiwis can chime in below. I do know that many New Zealanders are cowed at expressing opposition to wokeness, as I’ve heard from people fearful of ostracism or even of losing their jobs.
Note that the American media, too, is sometimes accused of not just parochialism in coverage of different countries, but also of neglecting stories that are politically unpalatable to particular media. (You won’t often read anti-woke stuff in places like the New York Times or the Washington Post unless the story has gotten pretty big, as with the coverage of the fracas at The Evergreen State College.)
Click on the screenshot to read.
Adams takes the media to task for its thin coverage of three issues of national import.
1.) The debate about indigenous ways of knowing versus modern science. There is some coverage in New Zealand about this, but since there’s a hands-off policy of criticizing the Māori—New Zealand’s indigenous people—local media and scientists are simply afraid of criticizing some of the more outrageous claims of Mātauranga Māori (MM), the indigenous “way of knowing”. I know this because I’ve gotten many emails from Kiwis who agree with my own criticisms of MM and the government’s initiative to teach it as coequal to modern science, but are afraid to put their heads over the parapet. At the risk of being self-aggrandizing, I’ll quote Adams on the main source of news:
One of the most depressing features of journalism in New Zealand is that if you want to follow simmering debates of national interest you often have to look somewhere else than the mainstream media.
If you want to follow the mātauranga Māori debate closely, for instance, the most consistent coverage has been provided by Jerry Coyne, an emeritus professor of ecology and evolution from the University of Chicago, who has written at least a dozen lengthy posts on the topic over the past year on his blog Why Evolution Is True.
Professor Coyne has covered all facets of that debate in depth — from the Listener letter signed by seven eminent professors a year ago to the plans to insert mātauranga Māori throughout our science and research sector proposed in a government Green Paper.
In New Zealand, there have been critical articles on the topic published by the Free Speech Union and The Platform, but coverage of both sides of the debate has been sparse to the point of non-existence in the mainstream media.
2.) Accusations of nepotism by Nanaia Mahuta, the Māori Minister of Foreign Affairs in the Labour government headed by Jacinda Ardern. There’s no mention of accusations of nepotism in her Wikipedia article, but Adams mentions them below, and you can read a bit about them here and here. Mahuta has been accused of using her position to get perks and positions for members of her family.
Similarly, if you want to follow the barrage of Written Questions lodged in Parliament concerning accusations of nepotism made against Nanaia Mahuta, you need to follow the pseudonymous Thomas Cranmer on Twitter.
Over the past four months, Cranmer has analysed the relevant documents and collated the questions and answers put to government ministers by MPs — including David Seymour, Simon Court, Paul Goldsmith and Simeon Brown — to build a detailed picture of family contracts.
Despite Cranmer having set out all the details with accompanying documents, mainstream journalists have almost totally ignored the evidence and the serious questions raised by them. The couple of times Mahuta has been asked timidly about the accusations of nepotism by mainstream journalists, she has simply brushed them aside.
But there was an article by Kate MacNamara about these accusations. I’ve found it, but, as Adams notes, it’s paywalled.
A leak in the dam appeared on Tuesday with a detailed article by Kate MacNamara in the NZ Herald about a contract (worth $72,299 including GST) that was awarded by the Crown housing agency to a company co-owned by Gannin Ormsby, Mahuta’s husband, in a period when she had associate ministerial responsibility for housing.
MacNamara’s story was behind a paywall. It’s yet to be seen whether Mahuta — or Ardern, who is ultimately responsible for managing her ministers’ conflicts of interest — will come under the sort of pressure from other journalists that the allegations appear to warrant.
3.) The shutdown on Britain’s Tavistock Clinic and reevaluation of “affirmative care”. Adams is especially concerned with the paucity of news about the closure of the Tavistock Clinic, an issue I’ve written a lot about, for there are implications for “affirmative care” in New Zealand as well. Adams:
However, the avoidance behaviour of local journalists has been most evident recently in the wake of the decision to close London’s Tavistock Clinic — the UK’s only gender-identity clinic for children and young people.
Worldwide, discussion around the contentious issue of puberty blockers prescribed for gender-transitioning children and whether they and other young people are being rushed into drug treatment without adequate assessment and counselling has been intense.
But if you want to read about the debate in detail, you’ll either have to go to niche gender-critical websites or to the Times of London, or The Australian, or the Guardian, or the New York Times… just about anywhere except the mainstream media in New Zealand.
The problem with outsourcing such news to international commentators, of course, is that no matter how many overseas news sites cover the developments, none is going to provide detailed information about New Zealand’s situation.
Adams notes that New Zealand public health policy researcher, Dr Sarah Donovan, did write a piece merely asking why there was no coverage of the report on Tavistock by Hilary Cass—the report that led to Tavistock’s closure—but Donovan was immediately subject to a social media onslaught. This despite the fact that New Zealand’s position on puberty blockers is now at odds with that of Britain’s National Health Service:
Yet Dr Donovan did nothing more dramatic than mention that it is extremely difficult to find media coverage for questions such as why New Zealand’s Ministry of Health has a statement on its website at odds with the guidance on Britain’s NHS page.
The MOH asserts: “Blockers are a safe and fully reversible medicine that may be used from early puberty through to later adolescence to help ease distress and allow time to fully explore gender health options.”
In contrast, the NHS guidance says: “Little is known about the long-term side effects of hormone or puberty blockers in children with gender dysphoria. Although the Gender Identity Development Service advises this is a physically reversible treatment if stopped, it is not known what the psychological effects may be. It’s also not known whether hormone blockers affect the development of the teenage brain or children’s bones.”
If this is indeed the case, then New Zealanders do deserve fuller reporting on the rising controversy about “affirmative care” and hormone and surgical treatment of adolescents who feel that they’re of the wrong sex. After all, that issue arises in NZ.
What all three issues have in common is that questioning them is perceived as anti-woke and thus socially unacceptable. You can’t criticize anything Māori; the government and its Māori minister are off limits (perhaps in part because of Mahuta’s ancestry; and of course even discussing potential problems with “affirmative care”, including medical intervention, is seen as transphobic. Many Kiwis are indeed afraid to buck the government:
The obvious question arises: why are our journalists and editors — with the notable exception of Newsroom’s editors Tim Murphy and Mark Jennings — so much more cautious than many of their peers in nations such as Australia, England and the US, among others?
Of course, open discussion of trans issues in many countries has been heavily restricted by a long-term strategy — dubbed “No Debate” — that pillories anyone who even raises the topic as a bigot, a transphobe or, worse, accuses them of helping to push trans people towards suicide.
Those who are even slightly critical are in danger of being de-platformed and perhaps losing their jobs and careers.
Three days ago I reported that Washington Post journalist David Weigel was suspended by the paper for a month for retweeting this dubious and offensive joke:
Even if he returns, I suspect his life at the paper will be forever hard. But since Wiegel apologized for this and deleted the tweet, my view was that a stiff talking-to but his editors and a warning that this must never be repeated would suffice for his punishment. (Surprisingly, in my old age I’m getting less punitive. Maybe it’s my belief in the absence of free will!) But readers disagreed with me, saying Weigel should have been fired, and so be it.
Now, however, the controversy has blossomed further, this time resulting in the outright firing of another Post reporter, Felicia Sonmez. Sonmez not only attacked Weigel, but did worse: she repeatedly attacked The Washington Post despite other reporters asking her to stop. The summary is in this NY Times article (click to read), but you can also read about it on CNN.
Here’s what happened to her:
Felicia Sonmez, a reporter for The Washington Post who in recent days has been at the center of a debate over the organization’s social media policies and the culture of the newsroom, was fired on Thursday, according to three people with knowledge of the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters.
Ms. Sonmez was fired over email on Thursday afternoon, according to one of the people. In an emailed termination letter, which was viewed by The New York Times, Ms. Sonmez was told that The Post was ending her employment, effective immediately, “for misconduct that includes insubordination, maligning your co-workers online and violating The Post’s standards on workplace collegiality and inclusivity.”
The email, from Wayne Connell, the Post’s chief human resources officer, also said Ms. Sonmez’s “public attempts to question the motives of your co-journalists” undermined The Post’s reputation.
“We cannot allow you to continue to work as a journalist representing The Washington Post,” the letter said.
That’s pretty harsh! What did she do? Bari Weiss summarized it a few days ago this way:
His colleague, Felicia Sonmez, had seized on the tweet, starting a public shaming of Weigel as a sexist. She’s spent the past few days reposting others calling her a hero; slamming one colleague who was silly enough to defend Weigel; posting about that colleague and tagging the bosses. Oh, and throwing editors under the bus (repeatedly).
But Sonmez has a history with the Post, and persisted with criticisms of Weigel and the paper even after Weigel was suspended. This is from her Wikipedia bio:
While a national political reporter for The Washington Post in January 2020, Sonmez was placed on administrative leave after tweeting about the sexual assault charge against Kobe Bryant shortly after his death. The Post ultimately decided she did not violate its social media policy.
Sonmez again drew attention in July 2021 for suing The Washington Post, alleging that the paper had discriminated against her by blocking her from covering sexual assault after she came forward as a survivor. The suit was dismissed.
An explanation at the NYT:
Ms. Sonmez, a national political reporter, sued the paper and several top editors last year, saying they had discriminated against her by barring her from covering stories about sexual assault after she had publicly identified herself as a victim of assault. The case was dismissed in March, with the judge noting that The Post had attributed the coverage bans not to her being a victim of sexual assault but to concerns that her public statements had created an appearance of bias. Ms. Sonmez’s lawyer at the time said she planned to appeal.
And Sonmez persisted attacking the paper after l’affaire Weigel (she was the first to put up Weigel’s retweet on both Twitter and her paper’s internal communication.) Ms. Sonmez then got into a Twitter disagreement with Jose A. Del Real, a reporter who acknowledged Mr. Weigel’s tweet was “unacceptable” but admonished Ms. Sonmez for “rallying the internet to attack” Mr. Weigel. Mr. Del Real later sent several tweets regarding an “unrelenting series of attacks” against him, and Ms. Sonmez questioned why The Post had not done anything to reprimand him for his tweets about her, including one that said she had engaged in “repeated and targeted public harassment of a colleague.”
In the following days, Ms. Sonmez wrote numerous posts on Twitter about the newsroom culture at The Post and what she said was the uneven way its social media policy was applied to different reporters. At times she jousted with fellow journalists at The Post on Twitter.
Many in the newsroom supported Ms. Sonmez throughout her lawsuit and were grateful to her for her advocacy for sexual abuse victims, according to two current Post employees, but the sentiment began to shift this week as she continued to tweet about The Post.
Some felt Ms. Sonmez was hurting the institution and disagreed with her use of public forums to criticize co-workers, the people said.
Here are the (mostly) liberal women of the view criticizing Sonmez:
WASHINGTON POST REPORTER SUSPENDED OVER JOKE: #TheView panel weighs in on the Twitter war that erupted at the outlet, which began when a male reporter retweeted a joke that a female co-worker found offensive. https://t.co/cVclFZQmjA pic.twitter.com/CsmCbrafhm
— The View (@TheView) June 8, 2022
Clearly the paper agreed with the latter, and couldn’t let one of its journalists malign the paper and her fellow reporters repeatedly. They won’t comment on the firing, and neither will Sonmez, but if you want examples of what Sonmez said, Nellie Bowles gives some links:
The week wore on, and more Post reporters were getting involved, sending complaints on social media and in staff-wide email blasts. As the instigator—a woman named Felicia Sonmez—started fresh rants each day, it began to get sad. One Post staffer (a Felicia ally) scrolled to see who “liked” the Tweet of another staffer (a Felicia critic)—he scanned nearly 5,000 names to find four Post reporters who liked the critic’s Tweet. That’s just sad. Even the women of The View turned on Felicia Sonmez and her cause.
CNN gives more details about the persistence of Sonmez:
In her public comments Sonmez had been highly critical of The Post’s leadership, including Executive Editor Sally Buzbee, along with many of her colleagues.
At times, some of her colleagues went on Twitter to plead with Sonmez to stop attacking The Post on social media.
Jose A. Del Real, a reporter at The Post, responded on Twitter Saturday to Sonmez’s initial tweet. Del Real said Weigel’s tweet was “terrible and unacceptable.”
“But,” he added, “rallying the internet to attack him for a mistake he made doesn’t actually solve anything. We all mess up in some way or another. There is such a thing as challenging with compassion.”
Sonmez responded, saying that “calling out sexism isn’t ‘cruelty,'” but something that is “absolutely necessary.”
Buzbee tried twice to quell the public infighting through statements, including a stern memo issued to employees on Tuesday. In that memo, Buzbee, “in the strongest of terms,” outlined rules that all staffers are expected to follow.
“We do not tolerate colleagues attacking colleagues either face to face or online,” Buzbee wrote. “Respect for others is critical to any civil society, including our newsroom.”
But that memo failed to put an end to the affair.
Just hours after Buzbee issued her memo, Sonmez tweeted a screen grab showing she was still blocked on Twitter by Del Real. And she retweeted another user mocking some of her colleagues who had joined together to send tweets expressing pride about working at The Post.
Reporter Lisa Rein tweeted at Sonmez that night, writing, “Please stop.”
Sonmez replied and asked, “Do you have any idea of the torrent of abuse I’m facing right now?”
As recent as Thursday, Sonmez was still tweeting lengthy threads critical of The Post.
In her Thursday thread, Sonmez argued that the colleagues of hers who publicly defended The Post this week are white and among the most highly paid in the newsroom.
“It is a great workplace *for them*,” she wrote.
Sonmez questioned in the thread whether The Post’s institutional framework was working for “everyone else.”
On top of attacking her fellow reporters on social media, then, Sonmez accused the paper of bigotry, saying that those who defended the paper just happened to be white (I guess she identifies herself as “Latine”), though only a few reporters defended her. Sonmez’s behavior seems a bit unhinged, and by going public against her paper, Sonmez left the Post little choice. Even I, a free-speech defender who would argue that Sonmez has the right to say what she wants on public media, cannot argue that the paper must keep her on whatever she says, including accusing it of being racist. This is one of the consequences of public speech: you are not free of disapprobation by your employer (though if it’s a university or the government that may be illegal, an is often unwarranted).
But what about Weigel? Is there hypocrisy here in merely suspending him but firing Sonmez? I don’t think so. There’s a world of difference between retweeting a bad-taste joke that singles out no person or institution on one hand and repeatedly attacking your employer on the other. I don’t have a lot of sympathy for Sonmez, and, of course, she never apologized for going after her colleagues, or accusing them of racism merely for criticizing her.
Perhaps the main entry for Sonmez on Wikipedia explains her downfall:
Felicia Sonmez is an American journalist. A political reporter, she is known for her social media activity.
If you’re a reporter, you want to be known for your reporting, not for your social media activity. If I were a reporter, I would either not have a Twitter account or restrict my tweets to highlighting my reporting. Sure, Sonmez could give personal opinion, with the caveat that those opinions were hers and not the Post‘s. But repeated criticism of your employer on Twitter, while no violation of free speech, does carry the risk that your employer will take umbrage. Fortunately, the University of Chicago has a strict policy against reprisal, and I don’t engage in Twitter battles anyway.
Were Hitchens alive, perhaps he’d pronounce that “social media poisons everything.”
