I missed this when it was published on Dec. 17th, but it's awful, so bad that I'm almost embarrassed for the author. Just to give you a flavor:
(1) The article starts this way: "When the head of Columbia University suggested that free speech was banned in Tehran, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad not only disagreed, he also invited Lee C. Bollinger to come and see for himself. The retort won Ahmadinejad applause on the New York campus and accolades back home."
(2) Columbia is home to many far-left professors who specialize in the Middle East, including Joseph Massad, who, as VC readers will recall, argues that there is a "Gay International" conspiracy to impose Western notions of homosexuality on Arab countries. But only "Jewish students" at Columbia are given the appellation "radical" by author Dafna Linzer. (The Post later issued a correction for the "radical" characterization.)
(3) Seventy Columbia professors were initial signators to a letter attacking President Lee Bollinger. Sixty-one professors initially signed a dissent to this letter. Linzer's characterization? "More than 100 faculty members signed a letter protesting Bollinger's leadership. And in closed-door meetings, some of them have accused him of pandering to donors, selling out Middle East scholarship and embarrassing the Ivy League institution.... In response, a smaller, rival faction, which includes a large number of Jewish faculty members, wrote its own letter in defense of Bollinger and urging careful reviews of tenured positions for two Palestinian professors." The letter, in fact (which you can read for yourself here), made no mention whatsoever of "two Palestinian professors", or, for that matter, "careful review" of tenure files. (It did, correctly, defend the proposition that there is no reason outsiders to the university should not comment on what they see as "inappropriate forms of teaching, allegations of intimidation or harassment, or the distortion of basic historical or scientific facts," by faculty).
(4) The article spends ten paragraphs quoting or paraphrasing professors critical of Bollinger, including repeating completely unsubstantiated allegations against him. Not a single paragraph quotes or paraphrases professors who praise Bollinger (except the paragraph above noting that that a defense "by a smaller, rival faction" was made, but not elaborating on the content), much less anyone who thinks Ahmadinejad should not have been invited to begin with, or who thinks Columbia has been overly generous to its hyper-politicized Middle Eastern Studies scholars. Bollinger himself gets two short sentences to defend himself.
And yes, the Post piece was supposed to be a news story, not an op-ed.
UPDATE: A reader has forwarded to me email correspondence showing that Steven Holmes, a national desk editor, was responsible for inserting the word "radical" into Ms. Linzer's text. As far as I know, primary responsibility for the rest of the article's flaws lies with Ms. Linzer.
You're right, though. Even setting the bar pretty low, this was pretty bad.
The reporter, Ms. Linzer, was not responsible for that out-of-nowhere "radical" label (switched to "pro-Israel"), though. That gratuity was dropped in there by her editor after Linzer submitted her copy on deadline, and he "apologized" later to the ombudsman for the "mistake," when called on it. (An interesting, and I think very telling, "mistake.")
In the Washington Post, those who blow up bus riders in London are deemed "terrorists," while those who blow up bus riders in Israel are "militants." Because Hamas is counted as "radical," Fatah must be "moderate." Columbia's highly politicized Middle Eastern Languages and Culture faculty aren't assertively "pro-Palestinian" in the classroom, it is those Jewish students with the audacity to challenge them who are "radical" or "pro-Israel."
One wonders why a fairly non-partisan, "Consumer Reports Does News" (if you will) sort of channel could not be a viable business model.
I think it is more that blogs are exposing what has been common for a long time.
"Have the various news media always done as poor a job as they seem to have the last couple of years, or has the internet and blogs such as this one had a negative catalytic effect?"
As you begin to do any research about the U.S. in the past 40 - 50 years you realize that the Hard-Left American mainstream media have been playing these tricks for generations.
Take someone like Dan Rather. We all know he is a liar who just made up the news. But read carefully the CBS report looking into the allegations. It found that VIRTUALLY EVERY SINGLE INTERVIEW done by CBS during the course of the controversy had misrepresented the substance of the interview and failed to do an objective job (see pages 80ish to around 110ish) http://wwwimage.cbsnews.com/ htdocs/pdf/complete_report/CBS_Report.pdf
And Rather's been doing this for decades. And he's one of the more "centrist" of the media's characters.
Yes, the hard-left media has always done such a crappy job. The difference is that now people who are not left-wing extremists (and people who actually know anything) can also write to a wide audience. [You need that activist dolt Linda Greenhouse who can barely string together a sentence to tell us what the Supreme Court decided - ha!]
The fatal flaw in this plan is that they would not publish any such critique.
Of course, I'm just a provincial reporter nowadays, but I used to work for a big paper. I don't think things have changed much.
Newspapers are not and could never be 'hard left' in a country like the United States. Their institutional problem is that they have to be all things to all people.
Take the 'terrorist' label, for example. It used to be that anybody who committed random violence would get that label.
Newspapers began 'nuancing' that word more than a decade ago -- well before the Internet could have been influential -- because of an orchestrated (IMO) campaign to distinguish one man's freedom fighter from another man's terrorist.
Some editors (at the Miami Herald, for example) were open about it, publishing staff memos forbidding the use of 'terrorist' as a label.
In the abstract, that's probably not a bad idea. Labels are handy to newspaper writers and addictive and usually not very helpful.
If I may be permitted a little anecdote, nothing to do with politics.
When I was a cub reporter, I was forbidden to label anyone 'elderly.' Now, it's true that, when I was 22, 60 seemed elderly. Now that I'm past 60, not so much.
My managing editor explained that he had had a complaint from a subscriber, who was 90 but 'did not feel elderly yet.' That became the cutoff.
Newspaper editors are much like political candidates in democracies, and for exactly the same reason: They want everybody's vote.
The "correction" they ran later was one of six the day it appeared. The other five "corrections" were all of simple, inconsequential misstatements of fact, e.g., someone was identified as an "assistant director," when they were actually a "deputy director." Hard to see those as anything other than "mistakes;" not so easy for me to see an editor's insertion of "radical" where it had no place in this article as an "innocent mistake," especially when it lined up with other spin there.
It's the same with labels like "hard left." Who cares if the reporter thinks they are hard left? If he has to use the label, he's just too lazy to outline the history and past actions of the subjects, if he even knows them. Is he afraid we might form our own opinions?
The label apppears to be a way for the reporter to show his opinion of the subjects of the story. Again, who cares what a reporter thinks? I know they like to interview each other but what do they really have to say?
Those meds must be old.
Seen any conservatives hanging gays?
Jeez. Get a grip.
So don't feel embarassed for the author. The real question is why the Washington Post lets her anywhere near putatively straight news. When a writer like Linzer seems far more inclined to repeat her errors than correct them, perhaps readers just give up on registering complaints, as I did.
Also, I resent your calling me a "troll." My comments on this blog are serious, polite, and on-topic. For example, pointing out that no other UN Security Council member ever voted "no" in support of any of about 40 US vetoes of anti-Israel resolutions in the period 1972-2006 is not being trollish. It is telling the truth.
Farfaman, you know you are not welcome here, but you continue to post comments anyway.
So one has to feel welcome to post comments here? Is that because you want to present only one side of the story?
"So one has to feel welcome to post comments here?"
LOL! Apparently not. Folks posting freedom of speech complaints need to have their irony meters serviced.
activities and expressed sentiments of the students who were affiliated with the David Project. I should have been more judicious in my choice of words. A more neutral, less, value-laden description such as 'pro-Israel,' would have been a better choice." He thinks his "mistake" was to be insufficiently "judicious in (his) choice of words"?! The students allowed themselves to be interviewed by the David Project, a pro-Israel advocacy group, which sought to bring attention to their complaints about what went on in certain Columbia classrooms, in particular those of a few MELAC faculty. That is why Holmes thought to characterize "the activities and expressed sentiments of the students" as "radical," though now he thinks it would have been "more judicious" to have gone with the more "neutral" pro-Israel? In the future, he will try to be more be more careful with the adjectives and adverbs he drops into his reporters stories to give them more "color" or "flavor," like you or I might add salt to bring out the flavor of food.
Mr. Holmes and his colleagues are the ones who decide which perpetrators of suicidal/homicidal attacks on civilians going about their daily business are "militants" and which are "terrorists." I see the manipulation of readers with word choices like these, and "radical" when it conforms to the editor's biases, as very troubling, indeed even "as bad," or worse than self-evidently flawed reporting you cite in your 1-4. IMO.
[DB, before you retire once more to scholarly pursuits, care to say anything about Landau, the editor of Haaretz, the voice of the Israeli Left, telling Condi Rice that Israel needs to be "raped" and the contemplation of it happening is his "wet dream"?]
I stopped reading the Times eight years ago (after the Clinton impeachment). The WaPo? After May of 2004, when mil-blogger's exposed Ravi-what's his name of "reporting" on the first battle of Falujah without any input from the US Army in the field there! Of course, he was rewarded with the irrelevant book "Life in the Imperial City" and an editors post at the WaPo.
Thanks David for confirming my prescience.
Touche my friend.