Tuesday Morning Reading
Posted on December 9th, 2014 in Uncategorized | 32 Comments »
Some of the best stuff I’ve read lately….
1) This piece in Slate by Emily Yoffe, “The Campus Rape Correction,” is an absolutely superb piece of writing and reporting. Yoffe’s is the most methodical, serious examination of “rape culture” that I’ve seen; she debunks the usual statistics that constantly get thrown around as if they were credible, and looks at the way exaggerated estimates of sexual assault on campus are leading to real injustices—against men.
Money graf:
I’ve read through the court filings and investigative reports of a number of these cases, and it’s clear to me that many of the accused are indeed being treated unfairly. Government officials and campus administrators are attempting to legislate the bedroom behavior of students with rules and requirements that would be comic if their effects weren’t frequently so tragic. The legal filings in the cases brought by young men accused of sexual violence often begin like a script for a college sex farce but end with the protagonist finding himself in a Soviet-style show trial.
I hope Slate nominates this piece for a National Magazine Award…
2) Remind me never to make Erik Wemple mad. The Washington Post’s media critic has been absolutely shredding Rolling Stone, and in this piece, titled Rolling Stone’s disastrous U-Va. story: A case of real media bias, Wemple looks at how Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s pre-existing bias led to the publication of a horrible piece of journalism. For example:
Under the scenario cited by Erdely, the Phi Kappa Psi members are not just criminal sexual-assault offenders, they’re criminal sexual-assault conspiracists, planners, long-range schemers. If this allegation alone hadn’t triggered an all-out scramble at Rolling Stone for more corroboration, nothing would have. Anyone who touched this story — save newsstand personnel — should lose their job. The “grooming” anecdote indicates not only that Erdely believed whatever diabolical things about these frat guys told to her, she wanted to believe them. And then Rolling Stone published them.
Wemple has repeatedly called for all the Rolling Stone editors who worked on the story to be fired. We’ll see.
3) A few months ago, everyone loved Chris Hughes; journalists love rich guys who seem willing to bankroll us and not worry too much about turning a profit. But now that he’s crushed The New Republic under his Gucci boots, a number of those who once professed their admiration for him have taken the long knives out—including the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank, in a story called “The New Republic is dead, thanks to its owner, Chris Hughes.”
Among the evildoing Milbank attributes to Hughes:
a) Hughes ousted his intellectual partner [editor Franklin] Foer without even the courtesy of telling him; Foer found out when his replacement, a man who previously had been fired as editor of the gossip Web site Gawker, began announcing himself as the new editor and offering people jobs.
b) Hughes is no [Walter] Lippmann; he’s a callow man who accidentally became rich — to the tune of some $700 million — because he had the luck of being Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s roommate at Harvard.
c) At a lavish 100th-anniversary gala for the magazine at the Mellon Auditorium on Nov. 19, Hughes did the seating chart himself — and he put most of the magazine staff at tables in the back.
And that’s just for starters…
4) In a terrific Boston Review essay called “Feminism Can Handle It,” Judith Levine chastises feminists who accuse skeptics such as myself of “rape denialism.”
…The charge is hurled at anyone who questions the veracity of a story, statistic (one in five women students sexually assaulted), or policy (yes means yes). And if men are slapped down when they question these orthodoxies, special punishment attends female critics.
5) And a question: Where is the New York Times? A couple of weeks ago, NYT media critic David Carr wrote about how he had dropped the ball on the Bill Cosby story for years. (And years. And years.)
He—and the rest of the Times—are doing pretty much the same thing with UVA. The Times has been late, reactive, and a non-player in this media story where a number of news organizations—WashPo, Slate, Reason—are excelling.
32 Responses
12/9/2024 9:52 am
Richard
The NYT interviewed Rolling Stone editor Will Dana about the Rape on Campus blowback. The quotes from Dana begin about halfway down.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/08/business/media/rolling-stone-tries-to-regroup-after-campus-rape-article-is-disputed.html
12/9/2024 9:59 am
Still waiting for someone to call out Jann Wenner. What about you?
12/9/2024 10:00 am
I certainly do not think that you or anyone else is a “rape apologist”. I also agree that the Slate article is excellent, and mentioned it in one of my comments. But, if we insist upon framing the discussion about UVa. and of “rape culture” in general within a narrative of political debate, rape survivors will suffer, as was feared by some. In 1981, a young woman very close to my family was brutally beaten, raped, and murdered by two men. She is still mourned by all of us. The University of Virginia, in the wake of the murder of Hannah Graham, would have been completely remiss, morally and in every other way, had the administration not responded to the RS story in the way in which it did. Now the fall out must be dealt with, and it is being dealt with, from what I can tell. To just lawyer up and move on, as some have suggested, would smack of the “good ole boy” network, and not only be morally reprehensible, but a bad PR move, for those who don’t see a moral imperative involved. Virginia’s lawmakers are getting on board and taking these matters seriously. It is remarkable.
12/9/2024 10:31 am
Glenn Reynolds has a column in the USAToday: “When rape matters, and when it doesn’t”. Interesting read.
12/9/2024 10:56 am
Richard
I would like to hear your thoughts on the fact that Sabrina agreed to allow Jackie to do her own fact checking on her part of the story.
I have posted the quote several times from the Wash Po piece where this was reported.
Have you ever heard of this practice?
12/9/2024 10:56 am
That Yoffe piece is superb. It’s the first mainstream piece that I’ve read that really digs into the rape statistics.
The disparity between what the, broadly speaking, “activists” use and what the social scientists have apparently found is pretty troubling. One of the two has got it nearly completely wrong.
12/9/2024 11:41 am
Richard,
Thanks for the link to Judith Levine. She nails it!
12/9/2024 11:50 am
SNS—The thing is, I don’t know what that line actually means. If it meant that Rolling Stone literally gave the text to Jackie and then said, okay, now you go confirm it, that would be absurd. If it meant that they let her read it to point out any inaccuracies, that would be slightly weird but probably not the worst thing in the world. Hey, if it’s all about her, why not run it by her to see if her version is correct.
What I think it must mean, though, is that Rolling Stone let Jackie read the story to verify it—and then they didn’t fact-check it with anyone else. In other words, she was the *only* person that they checked the story with. Which is, of course, disastrous.
12/9/2024 11:54 am
The story of possible sexual assault at UVa is tumbling toward a supermarket tabloid milieu for the moment. If it turns out to be a “hoax,” it will end up being a morality play about bad journalism, in part. It will be a morality play in any event, since the dramatis personae have already acquired their fifteen minutes of fame in the public lexicon.
None of the above alleviates the obvious tragedy for the persons associated with this “drama,” whatever parts of it may be true, however.
12/9/2024 11:55 am
b) Hughes is no [Walter] Lippmann; he’s a callow man who accidentally became rich — to the tune of some $700 million — because he had the luck of being Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s roommate at Harvard.
How much of the criticism of Hughes by Milbank and others is motivated by racial animus?
12/9/2024 12:14 pm
I agree, the Yoffe piece was detailed and free of the emotionalism and editorializing that is common with this subject matter. It was also scary as hell.
Something about TNR: I don’t really understand all of these journalists going after Chris Hughes. He’s the owner. He can do what he wants. To be, as someone who is not a journalist, it makes no sense at all to call an owner names. He might be your boss someday. Furthermore, if you are a former employee, to talk about your boss that way makes you come across as unreliable, peevish, and disloyal.
I’m not saying Chris Hughes cannot be criticized; I’m saying if you are a writer you should think about how you express yourself. Everything you write is on your resume.
12/9/2024 12:19 pm
Bing-what the hell are you talking about?
SPMoore8-Sure, he’s the owner and he can do what he wants. Doesn’t mean they have to keep working for him. But also, there are good owners and bad owners, right? Like, the Mara family are good owners; Dan Snyder is a bad owner. I think that if you quit in protest over what you see as bad ownership, you’re within your rights to speak out about it-especially if you think the new owner is destroying the organization in question.
12/9/2024 12:36 pm
Richard: I totally agree that former employees have a right to criticize their former employer. I just think that some of this criticism is excessive. E.g., calling someone a “coward” or a “fraud” — that’s pretty heavy duty, and if I were in the industry, not only would I avoid using terms like that, I would prefer to document and argue dispassionately.
12/9/2024 12:42 pm
Yoffe’s article was very, very disturbing. One can hope this powder keg that SRE lit will do something to change the trend of university kangaroo courts and insular activist groups stirring up witch hunts.
12/9/2024 12:44 pm
Richard: Just to follow up on Milbank’s column which I have just read in its entirety.
You know, there’s a logical sequence whereby you lay out the facts and let the reader draw the conclusion. You don’t have to call any names. Just the body of the facts presented in that article, if just presented laconically — and you can do a lot of irony and sarcasm when being laconic — would have been as devastating, even more devastating, than any “Chris Hughes is X” type lede comment.
12/9/2024 12:45 pm
Richard
I had the same reaction — basically confusion.
However, when Rolling Stone wrote in their updated apology that they were told “Andy” and “Cindy” wouldn’t speak to them — it all seemed to click.
I could be wrong, but the only way Sabrina would have been able to contact andy and cindy would have been through Jackie, because no one besides Jackie knew the real names of the friends who met her on the night of the alleged attack.
And so to cover-up the fact that her story had changed so much from the first night, Jackie obviously wouldn’t want Sabrina to talk to these friends.
You see where I am going with this…
12/9/2024 12:54 pm
In a partial defense of Hughes, Lippmann couldn’t pull off today what he did when he co-founded TNR. It’s obviously a completely different media world.
Lippmann’s personal politics were odd: he was a young socialist, originally supported FDR’s domestic legislation, then turned against both. But his views on democratic theory and the role of public opinion and the news are still worth reading almost a century later.
We can see what he meant in this controversy over “rape culture” and our universities. Public opinion can easily be misled and confused and participatory democracy simply will not work. Elitist? Yes he was. But was he wrong?
12/9/2024 1:00 pm
“trend of university kangaroo courts and insular activist groups stirring up witch hunts”
There are several examples in the Yoffe article, but often the issue is that procedures were NOT followed. These places need to hold inept administrators accountable. But I do not see evidence of a “trend.” I am staying tuned.
12/9/2024 1:09 pm
SE,
“These places need to hold inept administrators accountable.”
Are administrators well equipped to adjudicate these cases? Is there a case for turning them over to the courts?
- CS
12/9/2024 1:13 pm
SPMoore8:
The Yoffe article is scary. Did university administrators all read Kafka when these procedures were established?
I was more worried about my son getting falsely accused about some innocent hookup than I was about my daughter actually being attacked on campus.
My daughter was taught to control her circumstances to the best of her ability by using common sense. So she didn’t go down dark alleys alone or let a guy she barely knows pull her aside at a party and go with him to a room. No guarantees but she did her best to be a difficult target.
My son, even if he was smart and stayed miles from anything that could be considered a sexual assault, could still be swept up in the campus rape culture, especially since he was in a fraternity.
Thankfully both have graduated without incidence. Hopefully in 20 years when my grandchildren go to college the rape culture hysteria will be tamed.
12/9/2024 1:29 pm
“Are administrators well equipped to adjudicate these cases?”
Given that there are good professional resources to so the fact-finding, as in most cases there seems to be, your question boils down to whether the administrators at (for example) Michigan are decent human beings with the common sense God gave us all. It appears they are not. Such people, and others, have often mistreated complainants; here they are mistreating the accused. But as I say, this doesn’t necessarily mean policies are bad or there is any conspiracy.
I tend to blame individuals almost always.
12/9/2024 1:30 pm
*so -> do
12/9/2024 1:42 pm
The “racial animus” concerns the fact that a huge number of Jews are losing their jobs at TNR. A year ago Jonathan Chait wrote and article defending Hughes against charges of anti-Semitism (made by William Kristol’s son-in-law) with an article sarcastically entitled “Hitler Alive and Well, Owning Liberal Magazine”
The money paragraph:
So, in a mere 314 words, we have gone from a purge of Jews to a report that half the writers removed from a titular list of former contributors are Jewish, and some of them hold hawkish positions on Israel, and one holds dovish views. (A scan of the current and still rather long contributing editor roster suggests that the remaining proportion is at least as heavily Jewish as those ushered off it.) This is not quite the publishing Kristallnacht the Free Beacon’s readers were promised.
The problem is, if you clean house on a magazine where Jews are heavy overrepresented then the people who get cut will naturally be heavily Jewish. For as long as I can remember, TNR has always been radically pro-Israel while maintaining a slightly liberal sheen on social issues. It is very likely this will now change. Hughes will have to use all the victim protection points he gets for being gay to defend himself from the fact that an “overwhelmingly blonde” man is cutting the number of Jews on his staff back towards their population percentages. Look for articles in the coming days featuring plenty of “shattered glass”.
12/9/2024 2:06 pm
Interesting how you are interested in the new owner of TNR, but not interested in calling out the owner of Rolling Stone: Jann Wenner. Is he too powerful a man for you to take on Richard?
12/9/2024 2:19 pm
Just want to see his face,
What are you talking about? Care to elucidate? Let’s just say, some of my best friends are Jews-many of them whose families remember the real shattering of glass.
12/9/2024 2:58 pm
There was recently an article in Rolling Stone magazine about an alleged gang rape which featured heavily as a plot device shattered glass. A woman was supposedly raped on shards of shattered glass, later a beer bottle was thrown against the victim’s face and shattered, and a scene was set with the ominous background sound of the shattering glass of beer bottles breaking. These are all obviously invoking Kristallnacht in a literary sense. And the biggest tell is that in at least two of the cases the shattered glass was in extreme contradiction to common sense. But never let facts get in the way of a mythical Narrative.
The agents responsible for breaking this glass were the “overwhelmingly blonde” frat boys with their culture / ideology or rape. It doesn’t take to much imagination to read these as symbolizing the Aryan enemy of humanity.
In between the evil Aryans and the shattered glass was the eternal victim — this time played by the helpless Jackie.
So these were the elements that made up the Narrative of the Jackie story. Jonathan Chait already mentioned Kristalnacht in his defense of the very blonde Hughes. So there will most certainly be stories coming out in the coming days from people angry about what happened at TNR and I’m predicting they will go after the Blonde Beast from Facebook and accuse him of launching a journalistic Kristalnacht.
12/9/2024 3:17 pm
Just want to see his face,
Ok. Thank you. Knee jerk reaction. But honestly, how we do seem to trivialize the most horrendous events.
12/9/2024 3:50 pm
SPMoore8-I agree with you. The anti-Hughes language seems as over the top now as it was a few months ago when it was positive….
12/9/2024 4:38 pm
Richard -
The title of the Slate article is actually: “The Campus Rape OVERCORRECTION.” Makes it all the better, as I see it
12/9/2024 4:39 pm
Oops. The College Rape OVERCORRECTION. Accuracy is important.
12/9/2024 11:08 pm
The Emily Yoffe article (book? It had chapters!) was the thorough and concise reporting the RS piece should have been. However, it’s not splashy, and goes against some of the current orthodoxy of “rape culture.”
12/10/2024 7:49 am
Perhaps the New York Times makes the conscious decision to let WaPo carry the ball when it comes to UVa. It appears they were doing this when the Teresa Sullivan vs Helen Dragas contention was going on. Then the Times followed-up with an article in the NYTimes Magazine about Sullivan and the Visitors.