Instapundit Link Roundup Re: l'Affair Jeong: NYT Retcons Roseanne Barr Headlines, Wikipedia Circles The Wagons, Jeong Complains About White Men In Harvard Talk
[Update: now it's unclear whether NYT changed its sub-headline/caption. Some argue that the alleged original version of the caption was just a version used for search purposes, and was never part of the article. (Though there's a different problem there I've complained about before: salacious headlines / headline summaries that often show up e.g. on home pages (e.g. on CNN), but don't show up on the actual article page. But that's a different thing.) It seems like other are claiming that at last the metadata tag thingy was changed...I can't tell what's going on. Here's a part of a thread from /r/kotakuinaction. (Which, incidentally, is a good place for info/discussions about shenanigans in the gaming world, and for the on-going lefty propaganda campaign about Gamergate.) h/t to DJ for the heads-up on this.]
Hmm...so...that talk snippet was a response to "racist trolls"? 'Cause it sure didn't sound that way... It just sounded like straight-up white men suck prog-speak.
Hmm...so...that talk snippet was a response to "racist trolls"? 'Cause it sure didn't sound that way... It just sounded like straight-up white men suck prog-speak.
And, seriously, revising headlines (or sub-headlines) so as conceal the inconsistency between their treatment of Ms. Barr and their treatment of Jeong?
But the point I'd really like to highlight is the Wikipedia part; Wikipedia is, just about wherever it intersects with progressive politics, just a propaganda organ for the left. How is it that the remnants of liberalism don't care about that? It's as against their/your/our principles as it gets.
I'm not saying this is exactly right...maybe it's not right at all. I'm just saying that I do find myself thinking things like the following a lot anymore:
I was thinking about conspiracies and conspiracy theories on the left. Relevant here is the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy...academia, the media, Hollywood, Wikipedia...various organizations like the SPLC and Google... A sprawling network of prestigious and/or influential, mutually-reinforcing institutions. Leftists take over disciplines in academia that don't require a lot of actual technical expertise. They shift the disciplines leftward, and openly argue for merging activism and scholarship, openly deny any difference between teaching and indoctrination...create whole new disciplines dedicated to left-wing causes...and all of them produce "scholarship" that aims at advancing left-wing goals. Dedicated leftist activists police Wikipedia to minimize outbreaks of politically incorrect information...when challenged, they deploy the handy-dandy expert consensus argument...citing the consensus in...you guessed it...disciplines that have been taken over or explicitly created by the left. Humanities and social sciences students are brainwashed in leftist disciplines (and, let's face it, they probably check Wikipedia whenever they have to start a new project) and then grow up and go to work in the media, where they transfer the content of their brainwashing to the masses...and so it goes...
posted by Winston Smith at
5:17 PM
4 Comments:
I’m with you on most of this. But it didn’t ring true to me that the NYT would retro-edit what it said about Barr to make it consistent with its line on Jeong. And I you follow the Instapundit link, it does indeed seem that that part of the story just isn’t true.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m actually kind of upset about this Jeong stuff (I.e. even on the axis of evaluation on which you think it’s NBD). But the Barr thing connects up with something you said a few months ago about the NYT story (which turned out to be true) about Truimp telling someone to fire someone and then backing down. You suggested the Times had made a front-page headline out of ‘something they’d heard on the anti-Trump grapevine’. This bothers me because it goes along with a long-term Trump smear campaign which would paint outlets like the Times as genuinely no better, in their way, than something like (on our, rather than Trump’s conception) Breitbart (I don’t say Fox, because in this respect I put the Fox *news* outfit in pretty much the same category as the Times). And the Times can be totally Pravda-like in many ways, especially with respect to opinion journalism. But there remains a certain professionalism there (don’t laugh!), certain lines they wouldn’t cross. Putting up a banner headline without checking any sources is one. Retroactive CYA editing is another. I mean, I *might* be being all naive about this, but I honestly havn’t seen evidence of *that* kind of malfeasance by the Times or the Post. And it’s important if the retroactive editing story isn’t true, because if it were true it really *would* take the Times’s dissimulation to a new level — a major violation of journalistic ethics, different in kind from even the most demented kind of *spin*, of which I’d be the first to concede the Times can be as guilty as anyone. And false allegations like that fuel the ‘progressive’ narrative on the Jeong story, since they’re very keen to dismiss the reaction as ‘more noise from the conservative outrage machine’ etc. On this kind of bottom-line factual stuff I trust the Times *incomparably* more than Instapundit.
Damn. I fell for it.
Good nose. I did not check that part out, and I was just annoyed enough to believe it. Since it wasn't actually the headline and wasn't actually in the story (but was, allegedly, rather the sub-headline, or whatever), it seemed more within the realm of the possible.
Well, bad on me...but overall good news that the NYT has not fallen that far.
You make good points about the NYT. I do agree that there are standards of professionalism there (and at the Washington Post) that keep them from falling into abject chicanery. (And even a few violations here and there wouldn't mean that was false. Such rules reduce chicanery...they don't eliminate it.)
Anyway, thanks, DJ. I'll fix it.
You get what you pay for around this blog...
Cheers Winston. Notice that, in a post about media dishonesty, Instapundit does not retract the retroactive editing charge, even though there is more than enough information in the comment thread to discredit it.
Duly noted re: Instapundit...I'd expect no less...er...more...from it.
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