Shots in the Dark

In the Daily Beast today, the Harvard celebrity professor defends himself by attacking “the liberal blogosphere.”

The other day, a British friend asked me if there was anything about the United States I disliked. I was happily on vacation [Blogger: If history is any indicator, this is probably true] and couldn’t think of anything. But now I remember. I really can’t stand America’s liberal bloggers.

….the spectacle of the American liberal blogosphere in one of its almost daily fits of righteous indignation is not so much ridiculous as faintly sinister. Why? Because what I have encountered since the publication of my Newsweek article criticizing President Obama looks suspiciously like an orchestrated attempt to discredit me.

You know, I made a Joe McCarthy joke (those are always good) yesterday when Ferguson first made this insinuation, about which he has no facts whatsoever, because it’s an absurd charge and there are no facts to muster. Now Ferguson is making me look prescient.

His suggestion that there is an organized, “sinister” campaign to discredit him reeks of paranoia and self-importance—charming combination. No such cabal exists. It’s simply that there are a lot of people who care about accuracy in journalism, particularly when a Harvard professor writes a cover story in a once-respected national publication headlined “Hit the Road, Barack.”

And, yes, many Americans feel very strongly about the current presidential campaign, and when a high-profile scholar writes a piece arguing that the current president should be rejected, he should expect some pushback. Especially when—and this may be unfair, but I don’t really think so—that writer is not himself American. (I’ve no doubt the Brits would feel the same way should the parallel occur.)

But I digress.

Their approach is highly effective, and I must remember it if I ever decide to organize an intellectual witch hunt. What makes it so irksome is that it simultaneously dodges the central thesis of my piece and at the same time seeks to brand me as a liar. The icing on the cake has been the attempt by some bloggers to demand that I be sacked not just by Newsweek but also by Harvard University, where I am a tenured professor. It is especially piquant to read these demands from people who would presumably defend academic freedom in the last ditch—provided it is the freedom to publish opinions in line with their own ideology.

An intellectual witch hunt? The man who’s resorting to McCarthyism has the gall to invoke Salem.

There is a bitter undercurrent to Ferguson’s responses that isn’t helping him. His tone combines outrage and a sense of victimhood particularly unattractive in someone who’s living such a privileged life—and wrote such a didactic, bilious essay.

For example: In the second paragraph of this cri de coeur, Ferguson writes that his critics ” claim to be engaged in ‘fact checking,’ whereas in nearly all cases they are merely offering alternative (often silly or skewed) interpretations of the facts.”

All right, let’s fact-check. Ferguson writes in the third paragraph that “some bloggers” have demanded that he be “sacked” by Harvard. To the best of my knowledge, precisely one blogger, Brad DeLong, has done so. (Like Harry Lewis below, by the way, I strongly disagree with DeLong’s suggestion.)

So…not “some bloggers” at all, right? One blogger. Maybe not the biggest fact in the world, but you know, when you say that your critics’ fact-checking is all bollocks, you should try to get your facts right, not exaggerate so as to portray yourself as an intellectual martyr.

Ferguson’s response to DeLong is all maturity and grace:

My own counter-suggestion would be to convene a committee at Berkeley to examine whether or not Professor DeLong is spending too much of his time blogging when he really should be conducting serious research or teaching his students.

Niall Ferguson doesn’t really want to debate whether a professor’s outside activities are taking away from his teaching and research.

Ferguson reiterates his main critiques of Obama; the economy’s not very good, Ron Susskind says policymaking was chaos, the president has no foreign policy.

Fine, whatever.

But even in this mode, Ferguson comes off as—I don’t mean to be crude, but—kind of a dick.

For example:

In supporting his case against Obama’s foreign policy, he says this: By the way, I base these judgments on a great many off-the-record conversations with influential policy-makers here and abroad. When a very senior military man asks you: “Have we any global strategy beyond just trying to hang on?,” you have a right to wonder if the answer might be “No.”

Oh, well, suddenly I’m all impressed. Never mind. You’re basing your sweeping conclusions on off-the-record conversations! With anonymous influential policymakers!

Gosh, if only I’d known that, I would never have said a word.

(I must point out the tautology here: As far as we know, these influential policymakers are influential only because they have influenced Niall Ferguson. This military source, for example, doesn’t sound as if he feels particularly influential.)

Oh, and Mr. Ferguson, here’s one tip from a humble journalist: There’s not a “high-level” American military official alive who would use the construction, “Have we any global strategy…?” So why should we care what an unnamed British general says about President Obama’s foreign policy? Or maybe he was talking about England’s? The West’s? Who knows?

Language—it gives away deception.

Ferguson closes:

I don’t usually waste time on this kind of thing. In the Internet age, you can spend one week writing a piece and the next three responding to criticism, most of it (as we have seen) worthless.

I love that “most of it (as we have seen) worthless.” This is an ego out of control.

But there comes a point when you have to ask yourself: has the American public sphere so degenerated that it is now impossible to make the case for a change of president without being set upon in cyberspace by a suspiciously well-organized gang of the current incumbent’s most ideologically committed supporters?

Now that really would be something to dislike about this country.

The poor fellow. He writes a factually-dubious piece arguing for the defeat of the president of the United States, and when he is roundly denounced for the silliness of that piece, he responds with a straw man—that “suspiciously well-organized gang”—that only makes him look ridiculous. Professor, could you please just indicate one, any, sign of that sinister organization other than the fact that everyone involved has Internet access?

The problem, Mr. Ferguson, is that it’s not the bloggers damaging your reputation. It’s you.

Last week I was passing through security at LaGuardia Airport when, as I laced up my shoes, I noticed this flag hanging on the wall:

I dislike forced and bogus displays of patriotism—I can not stand, for example, how the Yankees now insist on playing “God Bless America” at every home game—and something about this flag caught my eye.

Maybe it was the copyright logo after “Flag of Honor.”

Maybe it was the line “Now and forever [this flag] represents their immortality.” Because, of course, if the people who died on 9/11 were immortal, there’d be no need for that flag. Memorializing with overblown rhetoric invariably suggests insincerity and hidden agendas.

Or maybe it was the lack of periods at the end of the final two sentences; sloppy grammar so often gives away the con. Think of all those spam emails from Nigeria—if only they could find a thief who could spell!

So I took a picture of the flag and, when I returned home from my trip, did a little digging.

Naturally, “Flag of Honor” is a scam. If you go to its homepage, you’ll see a lot of stuff about honoring the victims of 9/11. But the most prominent wording on the site takes you to an online store, where you can buy these flags of honor for anywhere from $20 to $1778. (That number is a bit like those missing periods; I suspect the perpetrator of this scam meant $1776.)

Proceeds from the flag sales, according to the site, go to several charities. But it doesn’t say how much of the proceeds, and there’s no name associated with this mysterious Flag of Honor group.

But last year the Associated Press did some digging of its own, and it turns out that the man behind the scam is a guy named John Michelotti, who lives in Greenwich, CT. (Lots of scammers in Greenwich, though most of them wear suits and take the train to Grand Central.) AP reported that Flag of Honor is actually a for-profit company, and though he said that he planned to donate 70 cents from the sale of each flag to charity, at the time of AP’s reporting Michelotti hadn’t given any of the proceeds away—ten years after 9/11.

Maybe that’s changed, but another page at Flag of Honor—not easy to find—announces that the “Flag of Honor Fund” has been closed “because of ongoing financial considerations.”

The flags, however, are still for sale; there are 10th anniversary editions, firefighter editions, and so on.

None of this surprised me much—the patriotism I trust isn’t copyrighted—it’s just particularly offensive given the horribly painful nature of the event involved.

In a way, this offense has some things in common with the brouhahas involving Niall Ferguson and Fareed Zakharia. All three men involved became less interested in substance and distracted by money or fame. But their shortcuts of language and thought revealed their compromises, and some people in the culture still care enough about standards to take those things seriously.

In this Internet age, where substance is to many not an end in itself but merely the means to wealth, and the appearance of substance is often an effective stand-in, we pay less and less attention to language because language is less and less lucrative. Language, for so many, is merely “content,” and content is just stuff you can sell. But words retain their power and, in a sense, their autonomy. They are hard to fake.

“What we’re dealing with here is a very carefully orchestrated campaign to try and discredit [my article] by those who are ideologically loyal to the president.”

—Niall Ferguson, today, on Bloomberg TV.

A very carefully orchestrated campaign? I don’t think I got that memo.

Or does his somebody-save-me appearance on that network mean that he’s already lost?

The Harvard historian continues his embarrassment of glitches as he appears on Fox’s On the Record with Greta Van Susteren and—I hate to say it—misleads Fox viewers about why his article is being criticized and what it actually says.

At the beginning of the interview, Van Susteren says to Ferguson that “even Paul Krugman has come out against you.” Ferguson responds, “Well, hell hath no fury like a liberal blogger scorned,” as if a) the source of Krugman’s discontent was a personal slight, and b) Paul Krugman is merely a “liberal blogger” as opposed to, say, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at Princeton, which is the description you might expect from a fellow academic, if you’ll forgive the implicit assumption in that phrase.

Ferguson goes on to say that “despite all the furious denunciations I’m hearing from the likes of Paul Krugman, [my critics] are not addressing the issues that I raise.” He then explains that his Newsweek article is really about whether President Obama has been an effective leader.

If you put aside all the nitpicking arguments about this and that, cost of Medicare and “ObamaCare,” and knuckle down and ask those key questions, Has he delivered as a leader? Has he led effectively? I don’t think the answer can be yes.

Well, now, hang on a second there, Perfessor. Those “nitpicking” questions aren’t really so trivial, are they? Because your denunciation of Obama, particularly on domestic policy, is based on factual assertions like the one about Obamacare adding $1.2 trillion to the deficit, when you knew (or claim you knew) that that isn’t actually true. That whole bit about “knuckling down”—well, that’s kind of what your critics wish you had done, isn’t it? Knuckle down and get your facts right.

Of course, Ferguson is trying to redirect the discussion (which, in a strange way, is actually an admission of how mistake-ridden his article is). Forget about all those things I got wrong, he’s saying; only small minds care about such minutiae. Think about the big picture!

Ferguson also chastises his “critics in the liberal blogosphere”—the phrase is red meat for Fox viewers, if not particularly accurate—for not acknowledging his critique of Obama’s foreign policy, which mostly amounts to angst about China and the fact that Obama was “completely wrong-footed by” the Arab spring and “failed to build on it.”

The section of Ferguson’s piece which deals with foreign policy can be found here. I find it incoherent, full of contradiction and generally nonsensical. (What, exactly, would Ferguson have had Obama do in Iran? Or in Assad’s Syria, which includes among its allies both China and Russia?)

Yes, it’s probably true that events in Egypt caught Obama by surprise. Was there anyone who was not surprised by events in Egypt? Egypt was surprised by events in Egypt.

Ferguson then goes on to declare his man-crush on Paul Ryan.

I first met Paul Ryan in April 2010. I had been invited to a dinner in Washington where the U.S. fiscal crisis was going to be the topic of discussion. So crucial did this subject seem to me that I expected the dinner to happen in one of the city’s biggest hotel ballrooms. It was actually held in the host’s home. Three congressmen showed up—a sign of how successful the president’s fiscal version of “don’t ask, don’t tell” (about the debt) had been. Ryan blew me away. I have wanted to see him in the White House ever since.

How can someone so worldly be so naive? Many important things in Washington have been decided over a small dinner in Georgetown (or, if you lean the other way, McLean). I am sure that Ryan has also articulated his philosophy at larger convocations.

And Ferguson shows his gift for misdirection when he says “I have wanted to see [Ryan] in the White House ever since. He actually wanted Ryan to be president, but Ferguson doesn’t want to say that now for fear of offending his potential boss, Mitt Romney.

A couple of things in the article and on Ferguson’s Fox appearance will be of particular interest to Harvardians. One, his critique of Obama’s domestic policy relies heavily on quotes attributed to Larry Summers in Ron Susskind’s book, The Confidence Men. One should never assume that Larry Summers’ bitching about the president reflected anything particularly meaningful. (Though perhaps Ferguson should have mentioned that Summers, while president of Harvard, hired him.)

And two, Ferguson, who has in the past said that intellectual life at Harvard is more rigorous than that of Oxford, takes a couple shots at grade inflation in Cambridge (MA), at one point saying, “I would give [Obama] — let me be tough in Harvard terms — a B-minus.”

That’s gratitude for you: Going on Harvard-hatin’ Fox News to denigrate the place that gave you a lifetime job.

In writing his article, Mr. Ferguson proved that, as an academic, he makes a great rhetorician. In defending it, he suggests that, as a person, he is kind of a jerk.

Here’s a challenge: In all of the dozens of Tweets on Niall Ferguson’s Twitter feed, find the word “Harvard.” Good luck!

Following are some samples of Ferguson’s tweets (and I promise, I’m not making this stuff up, there’s lots more if you want to look for yourself).

December 11, 2009: “Back to foggy England after a week of filming in Springfield, Missouri, and Charleston, South Carolina…”

Jan 3, 2010: “I had not realized quite what St Bart’s was until the yachts arrived…”

Feb 3, 2010: “Davos was like the antithesis of Jaipur…”

April 26 2010: “Learned a lot at the Altegris/John Mauldin conference out in La Jolla….Plus surfing.”

May 23 2010: “Florence even in last weekend’s rain is the perfect place to think…”

June 5 2010: “Now to Lisbon…”

August 5 2010: “…just finished a whistle-stop tour of Australia…”

August 16 2010: “An African journey from Senegal to Namibia…”

Oct 12 2010: “Fascinating first trip to Seoul…”

October 23 2010: “Enjoying the Big Easy…”

November 16 2010: “Barry Eichengreen was on fine form when we met in Singapore last week…”

Mar 15 2011: “To Cambridge—the English one…”

November 7 2011: “Challenging few days ahead: Christian [sic] Amanpour on Sunday morning, 92nd St Y that night, then Colbert on Monday…”

Etc.

I am completely fascinated by this snapshot of a life full of glamour, frequent flier miles and five-figure stipends. Could anyone find the time to think seriously about any issue—not to mention taking a few minutes to meet with a student or two—when maintaining a schedule this frenetic? Plus: How could Ferguson possibly know what’s best for the United States when he’s so rarely in them?

NY Mag adds to the pile-on. So does Salon, which calls him “an intellectual fraud.”

This won’t be easy for him to recover from, which is as it should be. His Newsweek piece is the same kind of intellectual corruption that Fareed Zakaria committed—cutting corners for the sake of power- and money-grabbing—and the sleight of hand is starting to become transparent.

Let’s start with the fact that he tried to get Paul Ryan to run for president, as the Times reports [emphasis added]:

…that evening [in 2011], none drew more attention than a relatively new member of that best-of class: Representative Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin and now Mitt Romney’s running mate, who spoke passionately about the threat posed by the national debt and the radical actions needed to rein it in.

“I thought, ‘This is the one guy in Washington paying attention,’ ” said Niall Ferguson, the Harvard economic historian and commentator, who spent some of the rest of that evening, along with Mr. Kristol, trying to persuade Mr. Ryan to run for president.

First, when does he find time to teach? Second, stop kissing ass. (“This is the one guy in Washington…” Gag.)

Third, there is a particular form of British arrogance that manifests itself in a Brit deciding who should run for the presidency of the United States which is particularly irritating when that Brit is making stupid choices but everyone takes him intellectually seriously because of his accent and Americans’ intellectual inferiority complex regarding Great Britain despite the fact that that particular Brit has already declared that American intellectual life is more rigorous than that of England.

Whew.

So then Ferguson goes and writes this incredibly dishonest anti-Obama article for Newsweek (oh, Tina, would you just stop?), in which he distorts a fact that even I know, and I don’t particularly pay attention to the health care debate.

The dek reads:

Why does Paul Ryan scare the president so much? Because Obama has broken his promises, and it’s clear that the GOP ticket’s path to prosperity is our only hope.

Hmmm. Professor Ferguson, so far as I can discover, you can’t actually vote here. So that would be “your” only hope. But more important, you’re wrong. (Just as you were when you served as an advisor to John McCain.)

Paul Krugman quickly pointed out that Ferguson is either wrong or deliberately misleading when he argues that Obamacare will add $1.2 trillion to the deficit. Krugman points out that the Congressional Budget Office, cited as proof by Ferguson, says basically the opposite of what Ferguson claims it says.

Ferguson…is deliberately misleading readers, conveying the impression that the CBO had actually rejected Obama’s claim that health reform is deficit-neutral, when in fact the opposite is true.

In the Atlantic, James Fallows responds to Ferguson’s article with a post headlined, “As a Harvard Alum, I Apologize,” explaining:

A tenured professor of history at my undergraduate alma mater has written a cover story for Daily Beast/Newsweek that is so careless and unconvincing that I wonder how he will presume to sit in judgment of the next set of student papers he has to grade.

Fallows’ evisceration of Ferguson is wonderfully entertaining, but sort of dismaying too, because it makes it sound that Harvard has granted tenure to an idiot or a cheat.

Fallows also notes that he once clashed with Ferguson after Ferguson compared Obama to Felix the Cat, writing, “Felix was not only black. He was also very, very lucky.”

Fallows is cautious about calling this racism, but I will—it’s that sort of casual British racism in which it’s all just a joke, and what are you getting so upset about, don’t you have a sense of humor?

Ferguson defends himself against the charges of intellectual dishonesty in his Newsweek essay, but his defense itself is, according to Dylan Beyers in Politico, “ridiculous, misleading, [and] ethically questionable.” Business Insider calls Ferguson’s self-defense “embarrassing.”

So first he’s either wrong or deliberately misleading; then, when that’s pointed out, Ferguson deliberately misleads again.

I guess Ferguson’s bored at Harvard—not that he’s around much anyway—and wants a job in Washington. (He is, after all, teaching a course on that great statesman, Henry Kissinger.) But does he have to resort to intellectual duplicity to get one?

In response to a Daily Beast article by David Frum, the Washington Post has retracted its story alleging that Fareed Zakaria lifted a quote without attribution from a book by foreign policy expert Clyde Prestowitz.

The paper runs this correction:

This article incorrectly states that in his 2008 book, “The Post-American World,” Fareed Zakaria failed to cite the source of a quotation taken from another book. In fact, Zakaria did credit the other work, by Clyde V. Prestowitz. Endnotes crediting Prestowitz were contained in hardcover and paperback editions of Zakaria’s book. The Post should have examined copies of the books and should not have published the article. We regret the error and apologize to Fareed Zakaria.

So that should be the end of this part of the Zakaria-plagiarism story, right? After all, the Post—and Prestowitz—-got it wrong.

But there was one thing that didn’t make sense to me: The fact that when the Post asked Zakaria about the alleged lack of attrbution, Zakaria didn’t say, “No, that’s wrong, here’s the endnote.” He said, what’s the big deal, it’s standard practice to use quotes without sourcing them, everyone does it, I’ve done it “hundreds” of times, and people constantly do it to me.

This last part of Zakaria’s explanation was deeply disingenuous, as the specifics he provided suggested that while people had used quotes from Zakaria’s TV show without attributing them to him personally, they had attributed the quotes to CNN. That’s not as specific as an attribution probably should be, but it is a clear indicator that this was not their work, and shows good faith.

But to the larger point: Why would Zakaria say that he engaged in this practice if he actually had sourced the quote to Prestowitz? My guess is that he probably assumed that he had just lifted the quote and didn’t even bother to check his own book. The Post, however, embarrassed by its mistake, shed no light on that question.

So last night I emailed Clyde Prestowitz and asked if he could clarify the situation, raising the same point that I made above.

Here is his response:

Dear Mr . Bradley,

Best wishes, Clyde Prestowitz

And here is the statement he attached:

STATEMENT BY CLYDE PRESTOWITZ RE FAREED ZAKARIA
When Fareed Zakaria’s Post American World first appeared in 2008, I found that it contained a quotation from my 2005 book, Three Billion New Capitalists. There was no end note number next to the quote. Thinking it may have been an oversight, I sent a note to Mr. Zakaria suggesting the addition of an end note. I received no response.

While I believe that the current standards and format for attribution have become confusingly sketchy and misleading, the error was mine and I offer sincere apologies for the confusion, misunderstanding, and hurt that my suggestions and inaccurate reading caused.

So…I don’t know if that does clarify much. I don’t agree with Prestowitz that journalistic standards regarding accuracy and attribution are “quaint relics”—all the attention given to Zakaria’s “work” would suggest otherwise—but maybe I am naive. And clearly Prestowitz was wrong to fault Zakaria, whose attribution may have been sloppy or unorthodox, but it was certainly there.

Yet the point remains that Zakaria acknowledged that he has used quotes without attribution hundreds of times. And that, despite his assertion to the contrary, is far from standard practice.

So what are we to make of all this? Look—Zakaria’s career shouldn’t be destroyed over what we know so far; agree or disagree with him, he’s a serious guy who has done a pretty good job of popularizing discussion of foreign affairs. (Quick: Name another foreign affairs-oriented show on television. Other than Homeland. …. Yeah, me neither.)

But this brouhaha does show that standards do matter, and that people who outsource their written work to pursue more lucrative branding opportunities will eventually pay a price for this unethical shortcut. Whether the price is higher than what Zakaria has earned giving $75, 000 speeches and the like is a question only he can answer.

“I’m the ex-fiancee of Todd English!”

—Jilted bride Erica Wang, protesting to security guards after being caught shoplifting $1, 000-worth of makeup from a Manhattan Sephora, the second time in two weeks she’s been caught stealing. (Thanks, NY Post.)

Todd English, as the Bostonians among you will know, is a chef.

The Boston Globe reports that Sox players are so fed up with Bobby Valentine—what do you expect, he used to work for the Mets—they took their complaints up high. To…management.

….another example of a deepening rift in the organization was a photo that has been circulated via text message that shows Pedroia smiling with two thumbs up in front of an apparently sleeping Valentine. The message with the photo reads “Our manager contemplating his lineup at 3:30 p.m.”

Well, that makes sense—naptime would follow chicken and beer. (Da-dum-dum.)

Yahoo, which first reported the story, has more detail:

The perception that Valentine is being scapegoated unfairly to divert attention from mediocre performances by star players exists among some players, according to sources.

But Yahoo also reports:

Issues that have inflamed players range far and wide. Leaving in Lester, a well-respected figure in the clubhouse, to get blasted for 11 runs and four home runs against Toronto soured players already beaten down by Valentine’s managerial style. Valentine uttering “Nice inning, kid” to rookie third baseman Will Middlebrooks after he made a defensive blunder – an episode to which Valentine admitted on WEEI radio – only furthered the animus toward the 62-year-old, who is managing in the major leagues for the first time since 2002.

What a wonderful way to start the day….reading about chaos and dissension on the Red Sox. (I wasn’t too upset about Curt Schilling’s downfall either—what a jerk.) The Red Sox are three games under .500 and pretty much done for the season. Time to start dreaming of next year?

For what it’s worth, I’m pretty sure I predicted here that Bobby Valentine would be a bad fit for the Sox. Should they bring back Franconia?