THE AGE OF BELIEF: True belief will often be false!

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2014

Part 4—The age of the perfect story: How can you tell that you’re reading a novelized account of some situation, as opposed to a real news report?

How can you tell that a journalist is fashioning a preconceived narrative—a well-shaped story designed to lead you in a preferred direction?

Sometimes, the novelized elements of the report are staring you right in the face! For one possible example, this was the third paragraph of Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s now-famous report, A Rape on Campus:

ERDELY (11/19/14): Four weeks into UVA's 2012 school year, 18-year-old Jackie was crushing it at college. A chatty, straight-A achiever from a rural Virginia town, she'd initially been intimidated by UVA's aura of preppy success, where throngs of toned, tanned and overwhelmingly blond students fanned across a landscape of neoclassical brick buildings, hurrying to classes, clubs, sports, internships, part-time jobs, volunteer work and parties; Jackie's orientation leader had warned her that UVA students' schedules were so packed that "no one has time to date—people just hook up." But despite her reservations, Jackie had flung herself into campus life, attending events, joining clubs, making friends and, now, being asked on an actual date. She and Drew had met while working lifeguard shifts together at the university pool, and Jackie had been floored by Drew's invitation to dinner, followed by a "date function" at his fraternity, Phi Kappa Psi. The "upper tier" frat had a reputation of tremendous wealth, and its imposingly large house overlooked a vast manicured field, giving "Phi Psi" the undisputed best real estate along UVA's fraternity row known as Rugby Road.

Just for the record:

As it turns out, the lifeguard called “Drew” actually wasn’t a member of Phi Kappa Psi. Meanwhile, did Jackie come from a “rural Virginia town?” According to the Washington Post, she comes from northern Virginia, the state’s population center. According to the Post, there were 700 students in her high school’s graduating class.

Whatever! We were struck by Erdely’s description of the UVA student body. Here’s our question:

Is the student body at UVA “overwhelmingly blond?”

That description might set a nice tone for an ideological novel—a novel about the depraved behavior of “preppy” white students who hail from “tremendous wealth.” Given the facts about UVA, we’d have to say that that description is more novelistic than factual.

Are the students at UVA overwhelmingly blond? “Overwhelmingly” is an imprecise term, of course. But according to this official fact sheet, the student body at UVA is currently 28.4 “minority” (mainly black, Hispanic and Asian).

Forget about being overwhelmingly blond; is that student body even overwhelmingly white? Journalists should avoid such imprecise claims. We’d be inclined to call that strange description part of an Erdely novel.

A cynic would say that Erdely was setting a tone for the story to come. Her story would pack a tremendous punch—and it seems it was too good to fact-check.

Cynics are saying that Erdely had an ideological message she wanted to convey through the story she told in her now-famous report. To convey that message most strongly, she constructed a “perfect story” about the most heinous sexual assault a person could ever imagine—or so the critics have said.

If you have an eye for novels, we’d say a novel was already forming in the use of that phrase, “overwhelmingly blonde.” Was Erdely trying to inform her readers? If so, she probably should have omitted that loaded description.

By now, it’s clear that Erdely utterly failed to perform the most basic tasks of a journalist. Her fact-checking was basically non-existent. She didn’t interview obvious people, including the three friends who went to Jackie’s assistance on the night in question, immediately after the alleged assault.

In her report, Erdely says that one of the three—the friend she called “Randall”—refused to speak to her about the events of that night. The actual “Randall” has now said he was never approached for an interview.

The other two friends who helped Jackie that night aren’t quoted in Erdely’s article either. In her report, Erdely never says why their accounts of the night in question aren’t included. (They have now contradicted basic parts of Erdely’s report.)

Erdely tells a compelling story; it just isn’t clear that her story is true. Let’s consider two other people Erdely never spoke to.

In Erdely’s telling, Jackie is subjected to a vicious sexual assault in her first month on campus. By the end of her sophomore year, matters have gotten worse.

In Erdely’s telling, Jackie has been violently attacked by a bottle-throwing student outside a campus bar. Even worse, she learned that two other women have been gang-raped at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity in recent years.

The violent gang rapes have claimed two more victims. Given Erdely’s overall performance, a cynic can guess what happens next:

ERDELY: She e-mailed Eramo so they could discuss the attack—and discuss another matter, too, which was troubling Jackie a great deal. Through her ever expanding network, Jackie had come across something deeply disturbing: two other young women who, she says, confided that they, too, had recently been Phi Kappa Psi gang-rape victims.

A bruise still mottling her face, Jackie sat in Eramo's office in May 2014 and told her about the two others. One, she says, is a 2013 graduate, who'd told Jackie that she'd been gang-raped as a freshman at the Phi Psi house. The other was a first-year whose worried friends had called Jackie after the girl had come home wearing no pants. Jackie said the girl told her she'd been assaulted by four men in a Phi Psi bathroom while a fifth watched. (Neither woman was willing to talk to RS.)

“Neither woman was willing to talk to Rolling Stone?”

By now, a cynic will wonder if Erdely actually attempted to contact these alleged victims. Given the way other parts of this report have broken down, a cynic may even wonder if these other two victims exist.

We don't know if those victims exist. That said, please note the state of the UVA campus as Erdely describes it:

Jackie has been viciously attacked by nine fraternity members. She refuses to name her attackers, even after she seems to learn that they are continuing to attack other women.

Two other women have been viciously attacked at the fraternity house. Those women refuse to name their attackers too.

Jackie has been viciously assaulted outside a bar by a bottle-throwing student. Erdely doesn’t even ask why no one was charged or pursued in the case of that (criminal) attack.

Not since the old movie “Bad Day at Black Rock” has a community been so enveloped in so much silence. Gang rapes continue at the fraternity in question. But even as the number rises to three, no one seems to be telling Jackie that she should consider naming the people who are conducting these vicious attacks.

Erdely completely skips this obvious moral question. Instead, she criticizes the dean for her alleged lack of action:

ERDELY (continuing directly): As Jackie wrapped up her story, she was disappointed by Eramo's nonreaction. She'd expected shock, disgust, horror. For months, Jackie had been assuaging her despair by throwing herself into peer education, but there was no denying her helplessness when she thought about Phi Psi, or about her own alleged assailants still walking the grounds. She'd recently been aghast to bump into Drew, who greeted her with friendly nonchalance. "For a whole year, I thought about how he had ruined my life, and how he is the worst human being ever," Jackie says. "And then I saw him and I couldn't say anything."

...That interaction would render her too depressed to leave her room for days. Of all her assailants, Drew was the one she wanted to see held accountable—but with Drew about to graduate, he was going to get away with it. Because, as she miserably reminded Eramo in her office, she didn't feel ready to file a complaint. Eramo, as always, understood.

Did Jackie ever tell the dean about these other alleged attacks? At present, there is no way to answer that question.

Nor should anyone feel certain that Erdely knew the names of these other alleged victims, who may or may not exist, or actually tried to interview them. At present, there is little reason to believe any of Erdely’s claims, explicit or implied.

At present, there’s no way to know if Erdely made any attempt to do any real fact-checking. We do know this:

Starting with the portrait she drew of the “overwhelmingly blond” student body, Erdely told a compelling story with a fairly obvious point. You might say she told a “perfect story,” a story about the most heinous possible behavior of a certain type.

Depending in part on one’s sympathies, it’s easy to be swept away by such stories of perfect complete misconduct. In this case, Erdely portrayed a “town without pity”—a campus full of preppy blond children with an amazingly heinous “rape culture.”

Rape is a terrible crime, and Erdely’s portrait is compelling. It just isn’t clear that her portrait, however compelling, is accurate, fair or truthful.

More and more, our journalism features these perfect stories. Facts are changed, invented and discarded to create compelling tales which support a partisan news org's larger view of the world.

Depending on one’s sympathies, such perfect stories are easy to believe. But uh-oh! When these stories are built on bogus or selective facts, they also create tremendous backlash from those whose instinctive sympathies may differ somehow from those of the novelist/journalist.

Different segments of the society rally around their instinctive beliefs. This may make it harder for the society to agree upon a constructive course of action.

For our money, the most consequential “perfect story” in recent years was the one about Big Liar Candidate Gore. Back then, we still had a unified mainstream press corps—and that guild was very angry at Big Liar President Clinton and his chosen successor.

Over the course of two years, they created a perfect story about Candidate Gore. They kept inventing lies they said he had told. As they invented these lies, they puzzled about why he insisted on telling them.

Many people believed the perfect story of the puzzling liar. In November 2000, false belief in this perfect story changed the course of world history.

Today, our press corps is much more fragmented. Various groups have their own news orgs. Erdely told a perfect story which captured one view of the world.

Erdely described a town without pity. For some, her story was easy to believe. For others, though, her story has brought on the hate against those accursed “feminists” with their endless lies and distortions. Fragmentations harden.

Because they are so compelling, perfect stories can be easy to believe. Often, though, this true belief is actually false in various ways. And the false claims being on the hate from other parts of the culture.

Is this the path to a better world? Everything is possible! This helps the culture of the perfect story thrive.

THE AGE OF BELIEF: Rolling Stone truly believed!

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2014

Part 4—The Washington Post checked facts: Today, a set of sad stories:

In the autumn of our own freshman year, a classmate had earned himself a derisive nickname: “The Birdman of Wigglesworth.” (Or it may have been Holworthy, a different freshman dorm.)

This young man had been behaving erratically. One evening, he had gone out onto his fire escape and issued bird calls into the night. In this way, he had earned the derision.

We can’t recall how we knew this young man; we don’t think we actually “knew” him at all. But we felt sorry for his plight. We spent an hour in his room one day discussing his situation.

We don’t recall a word that was said. Before long, he left the campus, never to return.

We felt sorry for that young man, who seemed to be struggling. We also feel sorry for the young woman at the center of Rolling Stone’s amazingly bungled “gang rape” report.

We think you should feel sorry for that young woman too.

As of today, Rolling Stone’s report has turned out to be one the most remarkable journalist fails of the modern era. We say that because the Washington Post has published a new report, in which a reporter actually interviews some of the people involved in this sad and strange story.

Truth to tell, Rolling Stone failed to interview almost everyone involved in this jumbled matter. The magazine published an horrific story—a story so unrelentingly horrific that it strained credulity in various ways for quite a few observers.

For reasons only the Stone can explain, its reporter and its editors didn’t seem to consider the possibility that the story they were publishing might be false in some major way. They didn’t seem to execute even the simplest fact checks.

The Post has now done some of those fact checks. Most significantly, they interviewed the three friends of Jackie—the victim of the alleged assault—who went to help her on the night of the alleged attack.

In major ways, the testimony of those three students fails to comport with Rolling Stone’s report. Their story involves a byzantine set of events.

These events suggest that the young woman at the heart of this story may be having some serious problems, like the young man with whom we spoke that evening, 49 years ago.

Please note. It’s entirely possible that Jackie was sexually assaulted that night. According to her friends, she did describe an assault that night, although the story they say they heard differs in major ways from the story which appears in Rolling Stone’s report.

According to her friends, Jackie described a heinous assault. A different, even more heinous assault is described in Rolling Stone’s report. By normal journalistic standards, no journalist has the slightest idea what actually happened that night. For that reason, Rolling Stone’s compelling report shouldn’t have been published.

You can read the Washington Post’s new report for yourself. In what follows, we won’t be talking about the student at the heart of this bungled story, which shouldn’t have gone into print. We’ll be talking about the bizarre yet sadly familiar behavior authored by Rolling Stone.

Why in the world did Rolling Stone fail to fact-check its report? We all can speculate about that. But let’s get clear on some of the ways the magazine failed to perform its most basic and obvious duties.

At the start of her report, Rolling Stone’s Sabrina Rubin Erdely told a truly horrific story about an alleged gang rape. In Erdely’s horrific report, Jackie is assaulted by seven fraternity men as two other “brothers” look on.

At the start of her ordeal, the student is thrown through a glass table; “sharp shards dig into her back” as a three-hour assault begins. At 3 A.M., she emerges from the fraternity house, barefoot, with her “bloody body” encased in “her bloody dress.”

Already, Rolling Stone’s report is deeply horrific. According to Erdely, this is what happened next:

ERDELY (11/19/14): Disoriented, Jackie burst out a side door, realized she was lost, and dialed a friend, screaming, "Something bad happened. I need you to come and find me!" Minutes later, her three best friends on campus—two boys and a girl (whose names are changed)—arrived to find Jackie on a nearby street corner, shaking. "What did they do to you? What did they make you do?" Jackie recalls her friend Randall demanding. Jackie shook her head and began to cry. The group looked at one another in a panic. They all knew about Jackie's date; the Phi Kappa Psi house loomed behind them. "We have to get her to the hospital," Randall said.

Their other two friends, however, weren't convinced. "Is that such a good idea?" she recalls Cindy asking. "Her reputation will be shot for the next four years." Andy seconded the opinion, adding that since he and Randall both planned to rush fraternities, they ought to think this through. The three friends launched into a heated discussion about the social price of reporting Jackie's rape, while Jackie stood beside them, mute in her bloody dress, wishing only to go back to her dorm room and fall into a deep, forgetful sleep. Detached, Jackie listened as Cindy prevailed over the group: "She's gonna be the girl who cried 'rape,' and we'll never be allowed into any frat party again.”

In Rolling Stone’s report, unrelentingly heinous conduct occurs within the fraternity house. When Jackie emerges and asks for help, her friends behave in deeply uncaring ways.

As Jackie stands in her bloody dress, they debate their future social standing. Their conduct recalls the heinous stepsisters from the Brothers Grimm.

In the real world, people can behave extremely badly, of course. Incredibly, though, there is no sign that Rolling Stone interviewed any of the three friends to get their account of the events of that night.

On a journalistic basis, this was amazingly strange behavior. In the past week, the Washington Post did speak to the friends. Their account of the events of that night, and of the surrounding week, differs substantially from the story told in Rolling Stone—and they have emails, text messages and photos to support their deeply sad, strange, convoluted tale.

Question: Did Rolling Stone even try to interview these students? Note the slippery way this point is addressed in its report:

ERDELY: Two years later, Jackie, now a third-year, is worried about what might happen to her once this article comes out. Greek life is huge at UVA, with nearly one-third of undergrads belonging to a fraternity or sorority, so Jackie fears the backlash could be big—a "shitshow" predicted by her now-former friend Randall, who, citing his loyalty to his own frat, declined to be interviewed. But her concerns go beyond taking on her alleged assailants and their fraternity. Lots of people have discouraged her from sharing her story, Jackie tells me with a pained look, including the trusted UVA dean to whom Jackie reported her gang-rape allegations more than a year ago.

Did Erdely actually ask Randall for an interview? Many readers will get that impression from that passage. But no such assertion is made.

Did Erdely ask for an interview? In the highlighted passage, Erdely may simply be reporting something Jackie told her. Beyond that, Erdely never reports what Cindy and Andy, the other two friends, said about the events of that night—nor does she offer any sign that she tried to interview them.

Alas! The friends say there was no bloody dress. They say there were no apparent injuries.

They say they did meet Jackie that night, but not near that fraternity house. They say she did describe a sexual assault—but an assault of a different nature than the one described in Rolling Stone.

Did Erdely try to interview the friends? We can’t answer that question. But this is what T. Rees Shapiro reports in this morning’s Post:

SHAPIRO (12/11/14): The Rolling Stone article also said that Randall declined to be interviewed, “citing his loyalty to his own frat.” He told The Post that he was never contacted by Rolling Stone and would have agreed to an interview.

The article’s writer, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, did not respond to requests for comment this week.

Rolling Stone also declined to comment, citing an internal review of the story.

Did Erdely try to interview Jackie’s friends? We have no way of knowing. But on a wide array of points, there is no sign that Erdely conducted any basic fact-checking at all.

(At some point, Rolling Stone’s “internal review” may help resolve such questions.)

We recommend the Washington Post’s sad, convoluted report. Beyond that, we recommend that you feel sorry for young people who may be having substantial problems—and for a young woman who may have been assaulted on the night in question.

In closing, we want to note two basic points. Let’s start by noting something Erdely accomplished.

In her horrific report, Erdely told the “perfect story” about a campus rape victim. All the conduct is deeply heinous, as if drawn from a Lifetime movie by the Brothers Grimm:

The victim is raped on broken glass by seven different men. When she calls her friends for help, they turn out to be the most self-centered people in the known universe.

The dean is slippery and slick—a fixer. Someone throws a bottle at Jackie with so much force that it somehow breaks on her face.

Jackie says she learns about two other gang rapes at the same fraternity. But those women aren’t “willing to talk to Rolling Stone” either. (We aren't told if Erdely knew their names or actually approached them.)

This is a Perfect Story, a story of conduct which is horrific in every possible way. All too often, our modern “journalism” turns on such perfect stories.

Here’s the problem:

Often, facts must be rearranged, invented or discarded to create these “perfect stories”—perfect stories which fire the soul and compel the reader’s reaction. All too often, our journalism runs on embellished tales of this type. Tomorrow, we’ll consider the most consequential such story of the past twenty years.

Erdely told a “perfect story.” Here’s something else she did.

Erdely discussed a story she never should have discussed. As Rolling Stone went to press, its journalist had no real idea if its story was actually true.

Even as we write today, there is no way of knowing what actually happened, or didn’t happen, to Jackie that night. As of now, the facts are a deeply confusing mess, to the extent that the facts are known at all.

What actually happened to Jackie that night? There is no sign that Erdely knows. But so what? In the absence of actual knowledge, she penned a compelling tale.

Erdely told a perfect story. She didn’t know if the story was true. She made no apparent effort to check it. But still, she rushed the story to print.

As always happens in these matters, large numbers of people believed it.

Tomorrow: False belief changes the world

THE AGE OF BELIEF: What should universities do?

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 10, 2014

Part 3—Rolling Stone fails to ask: Let’s return to yesterday’s question. Did a college student tell Rolling Stone that this event occurred?

ERDELY (11/19/14): This past spring, in separate incidents, both Emily Renda and Jackie were harassed outside bars on the Corner by men who recognized them from presentations and called them "cunt" and "feminazi bitch." One flung a bottle at Jackie that broke on the side of her face, leaving a blood-red bruise around her eye.

She e-mailed [Dean Nicole] Eramo so they could discuss the attack—and discuss another matter, too, which was troubling Jackie a great deal.

Did a college student named Jackie actually tell Rolling Stone that this event occurred? Did she tell Rolling Stone that someone threw a bottle at her head? That the bottle hit her with so much force that it “broke on the side of her face?”

As noted in yesterday's report, it seems hard to believe that such an event could have happened. Did the student tell Rolling Stone that it did?

We wouldn’t make that assumption. Once we realize that a journalist is an unreliable player, we should stop assuming the truth of various things she has said.

In this case, it may be that the student described some similar type of incident and the journalist embellished what she said. At this point, we can only know what the journalist wrote, not what the student said.

That journalist, Sabrina Rudin Erdely, told a compelling tale in the pages of Rolling Stone. It may turn out that some or most of the story she told is accurate, although the journalist’s failure to fact-check the student’s story has left this question in doubt.

Friends of the student have now contradicted some of the things the student seems to have said. That said, we’re focusing on the journalist here, not on the student.

The journalist told a compelling story in her 9,000-word report. She described the most heinous possible conduct on the part of various actors.

Indeed, the conduct is so unrelentingly heinous that some observers have found the story hard to believe. Along with the heinous conduct, events are described which seem impossible, given the basic laws of physics, including that bottle which was thrown with such force that it broke on the student’s face.

The journalist’s story is quite compelling. It carries a familiar cast of villains, including nine amazingly heinous men who stage a vicious, preplanned attack and three teen-aged friends of the victim who give her the world’s most shallow advice in the immediate wake of the heinous assault.

In effect, Erdely has written a Lifetime movie. It may turn out that the events she describes happened in much the way she reports them. But we don’t have much faith in Erdely’s accuracy, or in her morals or judgment.

Let’s return to that broken bottle so we can tell you why.

Erdely would have us believe that someone called the student a vile name, then threw a bottle at her with such force that it broke against her face. It seems hard to believe that this could have happened.

But as we continue this part of the story, the student reports this latest attack to the appropriate dean, Nicole Eramo. She also reports two other recent gang rapes on the UVa campus:

ERDELY: She e-mailed Eramo so they could discuss the attack—and discuss another matter, too, which was troubling Jackie a great deal. Through her ever expanding network, Jackie had come across something deeply disturbing: two other young women who, she says, confided that they, too, had recently been Phi Kappa Psi gang-rape victims.

A bruise still mottling her face, Jackie sat in Eramo's office in May 2014 and told her about the two others. One, she says, is a 2013 graduate, who'd told Jackie that she'd been gang-raped as a freshman at the Phi Psi house. The other was a first-year whose worried friends had called Jackie after the girl had come home wearing no pants. Jackie said the girl told her she'd been assaulted by four men in a Phi Psi bathroom while a fifth watched. (Neither woman was willing to talk to RS.)

As Jackie wrapped up her story, she was disappointed by Eramo's nonreaction. She'd expected shock, disgust, horror. For months, Jackie had been assuaging her despair by throwing herself into peer education, but there was no denying her helplessness when she thought about Phi Psi, or about her own alleged assailants still walking the grounds. She'd recently been aghast to bump into Drew [her principal assailant], who greeted her with friendly nonchalance. "For a whole year, I thought about how he had ruined my life, and how he is the worst human being ever," Jackie says. "And then I saw him and I couldn't say anything."

...That interaction would render her too depressed to leave her room for days. Of all her assailants, Drew was the one she wanted to see held accountable—but with Drew about to graduate, he was going to get away with it. Because, as she miserably reminded Eramo in her office, she didn't feel ready to file a complaint. Eramo, as always, understood.

Forgive us for a flippant remark. But as Erdely extends the story there, the Lifetime movie continues.

The student continues to be taunted and failed by everyone around her. She is disappointed in the dean—but Erdely never explains what the dean should have done, given the fact that the student was still refusing to file a complaint.

Perhaps there’s an answer to that question. Erdely doesn’t attempt to provide it.

That said, note the deeply heinous situation into which we have now descended. It is now the end of the student’s sophomore year. By now, the following events have occurred:

The student has been brutally raped by seven men, as two other men look on.

The student has been attacked in a public place, in a way which presumably could have killed her.

Most remarkably, the student has become aware of two other gang rapes at the same fraternity where she herself was assaulted. One of these assaults has occurred that very year.

According to what the student has heard, young women are still being assaulted by other students—students she can name. But she still refuses to file a complaint. As far as we know, she still refuses to provide their names. This is a situation Erdely barely deigns to explore.

In the real world, a victim of a vicious assault might react in the way this student is said to have done. That said, we’re struck by the relative nonchalance Erdely seems to bring to this horrible matter.

Should it perhaps be troubling in some way when the student keeps refusing to name her attackers? Should the student perhaps be encouraged to step forward?

Even as others are being assaulted, Erdely never really explores these obvious questions. Instead, she offers this confusing account of the reasons why many victims at U-Va have refused to file formal complaints.

The student is now meeting regularly with a 45-member campus support group. Erdely offers this account of their attitudes about the pursuit of the heinous people who are conducting gang rapes:

ERDELY: After feeling isolated for more than a year, Jackie was astonished at how much she and this sisterhood had in common, including the fact that a surprising number hadn't pursued any form of complaint. Although many had contacted Dean Eramo, whom they laud as their best advocate and den mother—Jackie repeatedly calls her "an asset to the community"—few ever filed reports with UVA or with police. Instead, basking in the safety of one another's company, the members of One Less applauded the brave few who chose to take action, but mostly affirmed each other's choices not to report, in an echo of their university's approach. So profound was the students' faith in its administration that although they were appalled by Jackie's story, no one voiced questions about UVA's strategy of doing nothing to warn the campus of gang-rape allegations against a fraternity that still held parties and was rushing a new pledge class.

Some of these women are disturbed by the contradiction. "It's easy to cover up a rape at a university if no one is reporting," admits Jackie's friend Alex Pinkleton. And privately, some of Jackie's confidantes were outraged. "The university ignores the problem to make itself look better," says recent grad Rachel Soltis, Jackie's former roommate. "They should have done something in Jackie's case. Me and several other people know exactly who did this to her. But they want to protect even the people who are doing these horrible things."

“Although they were appalled by Jackie's story, no one voiced questions about UVA's strategy of doing nothing?” Was anyone concerned about the student’s refusal to report?

Was anyone troubled by the fact that the student refused to name her assailants, even as assaults continued at their fraternity house? Did anyone try to persuade the student that, despite her apparent traumatization, she ought to report?

This problem doesn’t even seem to occur to Erdely. In the second part of that passage, she describes a student criticizing the university for failing to “do something,” even though the student in question was still refusing to file a complaint.

In the process, no one ever explains what the university should do. No one is ever asked if the student should be encouraged to name the criminals who assaulted her—the criminals who seem to be attacking other students.

At one point, Erdely seems to suggest one possible course of action. The university should have “warned the campus of gang-rape allegations against a fraternity that still held parties and was rushing a new pledge class.”

The university could have done that, of course—assuming the student in question actually made that allegation to the dean. Under the circumstances, though, would that have been a wise decision? Would it even be allowed under the federal guidelines which now regulate these matters?

Erdely rushes past these questions. And uh-oh! By now, it seems that the student may have named the wrong fraternity as the site of her attack—may have been confused about the location of her alleged gang rape.

Does it still seem that the university should have warned the campus about that fraternity? We don’t have the answer to that; Erdely doesn’t much seem to care.

Rolling Stone told a lurid, cinematic, highly compelling story. In the process, it included a range of events which strain credulity a bit, including a few which seem impossible on their face.

The magazine told a compelling story. Here’s what it didn’t do:

It didn’t attempt to fact-check even the most basic elements of the case. And it didn’t do a very good job of explaining what a university can and should do when faced with events of this type.

The deans are included among the villains; such villains help make a story compelling. That said, what should those villains have done in this appalling situation, assuming the student made the allegations Erdely describes?

Erdely is lazy and weak on that point. She didn’t bother checking her facts, nor did she outline solutions.

What kind of journalism is this? In part, it looks like the pleasing journalism of the perfect story.

Tomorrow: The role of the perfect story

THE AGE OF BELIEF: Do you believe in physics?

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 9, 2014

Part 2—Rolling Stone’s broken bottle: Professor Trefil thinks our human brain is a miraculous instrument.

(For yesterday's post, click here.)

On balance, we regard this familiar old claim as dangerous. It may tend to keep us from seeing how weak our human brains actually are, especially given the credulous ways we employ them.

Despite our magnificent brains, we humans are actually rather gullible. We’re easily led to false belief. The recent debacle at Rolling Stone helps illustrate this point.

Here’s what we mean by that:

In its 9000-word cover report, Rolling Stone described a remarkably heinous rape on a college campus.

Indeed, the conduct described was so heinous that some observers found the story implausible on its face. This is why they said that:

According to Rolling Stone’s account, an 18-year-old college freshman was brutally raped by seven undergraduate men at a fraternity event, while two other men gave guidance.

According to Rolling Stone’s account, this was not a spur-of-the-moment, drunken assault. The heinous assault has been planned in advance, possibly for several weeks.

Some observers found this implausible. According to Rolling Stone’s account, the young woman knew the identity of at least two of her attackers. Had she gone to the police the next day, all nine could presumably have ended up in prison.

With malice aforethought, would nine young men have put themselves in such major jeopardy? Everything is possible, of course. But some observers thought this framework seemed a bit hard to believe.

For ourselves, we don’t know what happened, or didn’t happen, to the college student in question. Given the bungled reporting by Rolling Stone, there is, at present, no real way to know what did occur.

Other parts of Rolling Stone’s account also seemed to strain credulity, to greater and lesser extent. But the magazine’s story-telling was gripping, horrific.

Was Rolling Stone’s gripping story impossible on its face?

Few allegations are impossible. But it seems to us that one small part of Rolling Stone’s story pretty much was. This involves an incident from the student’s sophomore year.

According to Rolling Stone, the student reported her rape to campus officials near the end of her freshman year. During her sophomore year, she became involved with anti-rape groups on campus.

To us, that sounds like a good thing to do! But in the passage shown below, Rolling Stone’s Sabrina Rubin Erdely describes some hideous blowback.

Question: Do you believe this incident actually happened? Given what you know of physics, do you believe this incident could have occurred?

ERDELY (11/19/14): Jackie dove into her new roles as peer adviser and Take Back the Night committee member and began to discover just how wide her secret UVA survivor network was—because the more she shared her story, the more girls sought her out, waylaying her after presentations or after classes, even calling in the middle of the night with a crisis...

But payback for being so public on a campus accustomed to silence was swift. This past spring, in separate incidents, both Emily Renda and Jackie were harassed outside bars on the Corner by men who recognized them from presentations and called them "cunt" and "feminazi bitch." One flung a bottle at Jackie that broke on the side of her face, leaving a blood-red bruise around her eye.

She e-mailed [Dean Nicole] Eramo so they could discuss the attack—and discuss another matter, too, which was troubling Jackie a great deal.

We’ll leave Rolling Stone’s account right there, although we’ll resume there tomorrow. For now, let’s only say this:

Rolling Stone describes the student meeting with a dean, “a bruise still mottling her face.” At this point, let’s put our miraculous brains to work.

Do we believe the college student was assaulted in the manner described? Do we believe that someone outside a bar angrily threw a bottle at her, hitting her in the face?

More specifically, do we believe that she was hit with so much force that the bottle actually “broke on the side of her face?” Do we believe that this could happen without the student being seriously injured, possibly even killed?

We’ve all seen cowboys break beer bottles over other cowboys’ heads. But that happens in movies—and that isn’t what Rolling Stone says occurred in this instance.

According to Rolling Stone, someone threw a bottle at the student, and the bottle was thrown with such force that it actually broke on her face. Do you believe that occurred?

This is only one small episode in a 9000-word report. For the record, it may be an embellished account of something the student said.

It’s clear from the way she handled this piece that Rolling Stone’s reporter is an unreliable narrator. We don’t know if this small story-within-the-story represents a faithful account of something the student said.

We do know this:

At some point, Rolling Stone’s editor read this gripping report. It included that account of the beer bottle breaking on the student’s face. (We’re assuming it was a beer bottle.)

Given his miraculous brain, did the editor ask if such an incident could have occurred? Did he question the claim that a bottle was thrown with such force that it actually broke on her face?

Almost everything is possible. We’re not sure this is.

And yet, Rolling Stone was telling a gripping story, a story about deeply heinous conduct. Given the way our human brains work, we routinely get swept along when professional writers tells us very good stories.

In various forms, this has been a deadly part of our journalism for a good many years. The convincing deceptions we get fed have often been swallowed down whole.

Did the student actually say that she was hit in the face by a bottle? Did she say she was hit so hard that the bottle broke on her face?

We don’t know if the student said that, but the Rolling Stone journalist did. It seems to us that this almost surely couldn’t have happened. But this claim was just one part of a gripping, convincing tale.

Alas! When professional writers start telling good tales, we can get swept along all too easily. Over the past thirty years, our journalism has often been driven by such journalistic misconduct.

People are dead all over the world because our brains weren’t able to see that we were getting conned, taken for a very bad ride. As he ponders quantum mechanics, Professor Trefil doesn’t seem to have noticed these widespread human fails.

Tomorrow: The journalist doesn’t ask

Supplemental: Do you belong to a race?

MONDAY, DECEMBER 8, 2014

Letter writer makes good point: On November 30, Michael Eric Dyson wrote a piece in the Sunday New York Times about the Ferguson grand jury.

Dyson started like this:

DYSON (11/29/14): When Ferguson flared up this week after a grand jury failed to indict the white police officer Darren Wilson for killing the unarmed black youth Michael Brown, two realities were illuminated: Black and white people rarely view race in the same way or agree about how to resolve racial conflicts, and black people have furious moral debates among ourselves out of white earshot.

These colliding worlds of racial perception are why many Americans view the world so differently...

Presumably, Dyson meant, in that highlighted passage, that white people rarely “view race in the same way” black people do. Yesterday, a letter in the Times took issue with that formulation.

As best we can tell, we may not agree with the letter writer’s view concerning the killing of Michael Brown. Beyond that, we don’t necessarily agree with his reaction to Dyson’s piece.

We do agree with his general complaint about what he calls “stereotyping.” We think his general complaint is worth reviewing:

LETTER TO THE NEW YORK TIMES (12/7/14): Although well intentioned, Michael Eric Dyson’s article promotes a binary view of race in America. The article emphasizes how “whites” and “blacks” supposedly differ in their perceptions of what happened in Ferguson: Whites were likely to stereotype Michael Brown as a monstrous black culprit and Officer Darren Wilson as justified in his murderous reaction.

I am “white,” so is my wife, so are most of our friends. Not one of us views the events as Mr. Dyson suggests. All of us are horrified by police brutality and the victimization of another young black man. Although a majority of whites may indeed blame the victim, a substantial minority does not.

And that is the point: By stereotyping whites as sharing in the same racial stereotypes, Mr. Dyson inadvertently helps to deepen this country’s racial divide.

R— M—
West Lafayette, Ind., Nov. 30, 2014

We always like it when someone puts scare quotes around “white” and “black!”

We think the writer overstates the extent to which Dyson promoted that “binary view of race in America.” But we also think it’s worth considering the general complaint he makes.

The writer says that he and his friends, who are all white, agree with Dyson’s view. He doesn’t want to get lumped in with people whose views he doesn’t share through racial “stereotyping.”

Good for him! Despite the horrors and the cultural separation enforced by our brutal racial history, we the people have not been turned into two separate-and-different “races.” Reflexively, though, we often stress the differences between the two “races” without noting the overlap and the sameness.

For our money, the “stereotyping” this writer dislikes was much more prevalent in Nicholas Kristof’s recent, condescending column, “When Whites Just Don’t Get It, Part 5.”

Not only was Kristof’s racial stereotyping strong. He assumed the obnoxious role of the sun god/philosopher king, taking it upon himself to instruct “the whites” about what they should think, know and feel.

The notion that we belong to two “races” was created and forced upon the world by our benighted ancestors. At some point, people might want to do what the letter writer did—they might consider rejecting the sense that they belong to a “race.”

In our view, “black and white together” remains a worthwhile battle cry. Even better would be this cry: “We the people together.”

How do we make that battle cry work? The letter writer’s refusal to submit to over-generalization may be a good place to start.

Kristof seems to believe that white people are white! As a self-appointed, all-knowing sun god, he may want to expand his vision.

THE AGE OF BELIEF: Truly believing at Rolling Stone!

MONDAY, DECEMBER 8, 2014

Part 1—Our miraculous brain in action: As Rolling Stone’s folly kept unfolding, we were struck by something we read in the Outlook section of Sunday’s Washington Post.

We refer to a standard description of the greatness of our human brain. The description appeared at the start of a book review by Professor Trefil.

What you see below is a thoroughly standard account of our human greatness. At least in the west, we humans have glorified ourselves in this way since the dawn of time:

TREFIL (12/7/14): The human brain, that marvelous instrument we all carry around in our skulls, evolved for one purpose and one purpose only: to allow our ancestors to survive on the African savannah millions of years ago. Over the millennia, the brain got very good at its task, keeping our ancestors fed and out of the clutches of saber-toothed tigers and their ilk. Yet despite its humble origins, that same brain can understand general relativity, plot the course of distant galaxies and comprehend the working of our very cells. In fact, it is little short of miraculous that no matter where we go in the universe, no matter what new phenomena we investigate, our brain seems to be at home.

As he continued, Professor Trefil described the “one exception” in this overall pageant of human brilliance:

“Since the dawn of the 20th century, when scientists began exploring the inside of the atom, it has become increasingly clear that the brain is simply not designed to be comfortable with what goes on at that level,” he said.

Professor Trefil went on to write a decent book review. Still, the analysts howled at his description of the “marvelous instrument we all carry around in our skulls.”

They’d already spent many hours researching Rolling Stone’s deeply unfortunate folly. In that context, they were struck by the professor’s upbeat account of the marvelous instrument we all have in our heads.

How marvelous, how “miraculous,” is that instrument really? Ritual self-praise of this type may keep us from seeing how poorly our human brains actually function.

Case in point—the unfolding debacle at the Stone, a case which sheds a lot of light on our Age of (True) Belief.

Let’s be clear. We’re writing here about Rolling Stone, not about the college student whose remarkable story the magazine didn’t attempt to fact-check.

By now, it’s abundantly clear that no one knows what actually happened, or didn’t happen, to the student in question. By way of contrast, we think it’s fairly clear what Rolling Stone foolishly did.

To provide a bit of context, consider something Charles Blow says in his latest New York Times column. Writing about our new age of activism, columnist Blow says this:

BLOW (12/8/14): The suspicion of bias, in particular, is what the most recent protests have been about. They are about a most basic question concerning the nature of humanity itself: If we are all created equal, shouldn’t we all be treated equally? Anything less is an affront to our ideals.

Bias in the system often feels like fog in the morning: enveloping, amorphous and immeasurable. But individual cases, like the recent ones, hit us as discrete and concrete, about particular unarmed black men killed by particular policemen—although those particular policemen are representative of structures of power.

These cases make easy focal points for rallying cries, and force us to ask tough questions about the very nature of policing, force and justice.

Certain high-profile incidents “make easy focal points for rallying cries,” Blow correctly says. We’d say there’s a key word in that passage:

That key word is “easy.”

Can we speak in somewhat unflattering terms about Blow’s presentation? Might we paraphrase a bit as we do?

Quite correctly, Blow says it’s relatively hard to make a case about social injustice based upon general claims of bias or misconduct. But he says it’s “easy” to rally the world if we come up with the right “individual cases.”

Trayvon Martin was one such case; so was Michael Brown. So were the heinous events described in Rolling Stone—the startling claims that Rolling Stone didn’t attempt to check.

(So was the story in “Jimmy’s World,” the 1980 journalistic hoax published by the Washington Post, whose editors made no attempt to fact-check Janet Cooke’s Pulitzer-wining report. So were the stories of heinous preschool abuse which sent innocent people to prison in the 1980s.)

It’s an old joke in journalism—some stories are “too good to check.” Often, to make real stories better, bogus facts may be allowed to find their way into the mix.

Michael Brown wasn’t shot in the back. George Zimmerman didn’t fire “a warning shot,” then “a kill shot,” as the New York Times falsely reported. Whatever happened in those cases, those claims turned out to be false.

It now seems fairly clear that Rolling Stone’s story was full of bogus claims—claims the magazine didn’t bother to check.

Despite the miraculous brain we love to discuss, this has been happening in our upper-end journalism for decades now. In the political realm, some of these hoaxes have changed the history of the world—and we liberals still refuse to acknowledge the fact that these hoaxes even occurred!

Rather plainly, Rolling Stone has created a new journalistic debacle. On the brighter side, this debacle helps shed light on the functioning of our highly imperfect brains, and on the role of bogus facts in rallying us to certain types of belief.

We’ll examine various aspects of this episode all week. Spoiler alert:

In point of fact, our human brains often function quite poorly. As a general matter, our academic and journalistic elites still haven’t discovered this fact.

Tomorrow: Do you believe in physics? Rolling Stone and the broken bottle

KRISTOF VILLAGE: Nicholas Kristof, god of the whites!

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 5, 2014

Part 4—Infallibly right like him: This has been a Week That Was in American news.

Gaps of imagination have surfaced in the wake of the decision by the Staten Island grand jury:

In this morning’s New York Times, a letter writer from New York City calls the decision “unfathomable.”

In the letter directly above that letter, another writer, from California, fathoms their decision just fine.

Can you fathom the existence of people whose judgments about such a matter may actually differ from yours? Or do you traffic in the ancient belief that those who differ from you on such matters must be essentially Other?

Questions like these have come to mind in recent weeks as we’ve read Nicholas Kristof’s endless series of columns bearing this headline:

“When Whites Just Don’t Get It.”

Again and again, we’ve been struck by how deeply unwise those columns seem. Briefly, we’ll try to say why.

Last Sunday’s column bore this headline: “When Whites Just Don’t Get It, Part 5.” As Kristof lectured, he suggested that we hold a “national conversation” on race—a conversation which could be led by Bill Clinton and George Bush and of course by Oprah herself.

This tired suggestion struck us as insultingly lazy, unthoughtful. In yesterday’s Washington Post, E. J. Dionne seemed to roll his eyes at this familiar can of tripe, suggesting that these “national conversations” on race are tired, formulaic, unhelpful.

Everyone says the same things every time, says Dionne. In the process, nothing changes.

In our view, Kristof’s call for a national conversation is insultingly lazy, uncaring. A 6-year-old could have dreamed that up on his cookie break.

Even more insulting—even more unhelpful—is the way this amazingly pompous man has established himself as the self-appointed philosopher king of the “whites.”

For ourselves, we don’t want to belong to a tribe—or god help us, to a “race”—which has Kristof as a member. After his lazy call for our latest national conversation, this is the way our self-adoring king of the whites proceeded:

KRISTOF (11/30/14): This “When Whites Just Don’t Get It” series is a call for soul-searching. It’s very easy for whites to miss problems that aren’t our own; that’s a function not of being white but of being human. Three-quarters of whites have only white friends, according to one study, so we are often clueless.

What we whites notice is blacks who have “made it”—including President Obama—so we focus on progress and are oblivious to the daily humiliations that African-Americans endure when treated as second-class citizens.

Kristof knows what “we whites” notice! He knows what “we whites” focus on. He even knows when we’re oblivious.

It’s certainly true that “whites” are often less than godlike in their various understandings and perceptions. Various “whites” will be uninformed, or under-informed, in a wide array of ways concerning a white range of topics.

As the sun god Kristof notes, this is part of being human. Because it’s part of being human, “blacks,” who are also less than godlike, will often fall short of pure perfection in their assessments too!

“Whites” and “blacks,” and everyone else, will always be seeing through glasses darkly. Everyone has something to learn from the perspectives of somebody else.

It’s true! Very often, “whites” don’t get something or other. Often, “blacks” fall short of perfections in such ways too.

But please note:

In the kingdom of Kristof, Nicholas Kristof always gets it.! There is no sign in Kristof’s work that there possibly could be some matter that he himself doesn’t get.

He quickly divides us into our “races,” then lectures one “race” alone. He helps this one race with its “soul searching,” seems to do none of his own.

His failure to note the limited of vision of all us Americans is a terrible, unhelpful thing. But the great god Kristof does it easily, just before he rattles all the tired, memorized statistics all readers have heard before.

We all have something more to learn, starting with the basic fact that we’re all in this together. But so what? Happily dividing the country by race, this great god lectures one “race” on what it doesn’t get.

He skips the possibility that some in the other “race” nay not get it either. Most disgustingly, he fails to ponder the millions of ways he himself, the great sun god, doesn’t get jack squat.

We’ve been increasingly disgusted by this man’s lazy work down through the years. We’ve been especially struck by the lazy ways he has lectured on public schools, a topic he seems to know nothing about.

There’s no reason why he should know something about public schools. But gods like Kristof don’t understand that they themselves “just don’t get it” in the same ways the rest of us struggle for wisdom and insight.

Instead, he repeats cant from “educational experts,” worthless piddle he’s memorized from the latest TED talk. In his latest series, he has taken to lecturing “whites” about all the things “we whites” should know.

We all need much more wisdom this week. Here’s the first act of wisdom we all can accomplish:

We can tell the sun god Kristof that it’s time to descend from his throne and join us rubes down here on the plain. He also might stop reflexively splitting his subjects into “blacks” and “whites.”

Predictable results: In comments to Sunday’s column, you will see many people who felt condescended to by Kristof.

They felt he was being condescending because he plainly was. The result of such condescension is obvious and predictable:

It drives people deeper into their camps, the last thing this nation needs.

That one letter writer will probably love the sun god's tired old lecture. Others will recoil and rebel. Does this lead to progress?

Breaking: Called away from our desks!

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 4, 2014

Will return tomorrow:: We’ve been called away from our desks. We’ll return to those desks tomorrow.

Supplemental: The kids are all right, the Post reports!

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 3, 2014

One key improvement omitted: In last Sunday’s Outlook section, the Washington Post ran an upbeat report about these kids today.

Professor Finkelhor wrote the report. This is the way he started, hard-copy headline included:

FINKLEHOR (11/30/14): The kids are all right after all

The news media likes to characterize today’s young people as risk averse, narcissistic, app-dependent, over-scheduled, entitled and “pornified.” Among the culprits are too much praise, not enough challenge, helicopter parents, cellphones and of course, the Internet.

But by many measures, young people are actually showing virtues their elders lacked. They have brought delinquency, truancy, promiscuity, alcohol abuse and suicide down to levels unseen in many cases since the 1950s. Rather than coming up with ever more old-fogey complaints, we should be celebrating young people’s good judgment and self-control—and extolling their parents and teachers.

You’ve probably heard that crime is down. But most of the remarkable facts about crime and delinquency among young people have not been trumpeted enough in a country just 20 years removed from fears that it was facing a generation of young “super-predators.”

Good for Finkelhor! That said, we were struck by several aspects of his report. That includes one major improvement he completely failed to discuss.

Finkelhor discussed the various ways in which today’s kids are better. General crime is down; rape and other sex crimes are down; suicide is less common; school safety has been improving dramatically.

That said, we thought the professor showed a tin ear on one or two occasions. Did he realize the way the highlighted passages might sound to adult ears?

FINKELHOR: Every generation of parents is alarmed by the sexual behavior of the young. But the accusations are more misplaced now than ever. Not only is the rate of teenage pregnancy down to record lows in the United States, but the percentage of ninth-graders who say they have had sexual intercourse has declined from 54 percent in 1991 to 47 percent in 2013. The percentage of high schoolers who say they have had four or more sexual partners also has declined.

Young people are showing a lot more self-control when it comes to substances as well. Binge drinking by 12th-graders is lower than at any time since surveys were started in 1976. The number of teenagers who have been drunk in the past year is at a record low and the drop for eighth-graders is particularly remarkable.

Only 47 percent of ninth-graders say they’ve had intercourse! Fewer eighth-graders got drunk last year!

We’re going to guess that claims like those won’t sound that great to many readers. But as Finkelhor rattled the many improvements, we were struck by the one big improvement he skipped.

Truly, it’s against the law to report the fact that test scores are up on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the gold standard of domestic testing! Finkelhor listed many improvements, but took a pass on that.

It’s just as we have always told you. Every researcher and journalist swears by the NAEP, but no one reports what the NAEP scores show! Never has this principle seemed more striking to us.

Finkelhor didn’t report the gain in national test scores. When he listed possible reason for the other improvements, we thought of Kevin Drum:

FINKELHOR: Why these improvements? Social scientists are mostly guessing. For example, over the past generation we have unleashed many new prevention and intervention programs for parents, families and children that use more effective strategies. We also have given psychiatric medication to many children and their parents. Although controversial, such drugs reduce aggression, depression and hyperactivity—which all contribute to conflict and risk-taking. Then there is the Internet, electronic games and related technology that have combined to relieve boredom, one of the chief drivers of adolescent mischief. Cellphones keep kids in touch with their parents and their friends, making it easier to summon help or get advice when they’re in trouble.

It might be the meds or the video games. Or maybe it’s the cellphones! Finkelhor didn’t speculate about the possible role of lead abatement in the many improvements he named.

An array of unpleasant comments were found beneath the article. Meanwhile, the Post proved it was still the Post through an accompanying graphic which we can’t find on line.

This was the headline on the graphic. We’re leaving the typo in:

Youth gone mild
Despite perceptions, today’s young people are less prone to bad behavior than there [sic] elders. For example, take these declines in crime statistics between 2002 and 2011.

Alas! The Post went with “there” instead of “their.” More strikingly, none of the statistics in the graphic spoke to the issue in question!

Are young people less prone to bad behavior than their elders? Probably yes. But none of the data in the graphic spoke to that actual issue.

When these kids today take over the Post, errors like that will cease.

KRISTOF VILLAGE: Condescension alleged!

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 3, 2014

Part 3—Columnist brings us together: Back in 1968, an eighth-grader held up a sign at a rally for Candidate Nixon.

The sign became famous, so much so that it has its own Wikipedia entry. “Bring us together,” her sign famously said.

That didn’t occur under Nixon. But as of today, it seems that the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof has accomplished this worthwhile task.

Last Sunday, Kristof posted the fifth installment in his endless series, “When Whites Just Don’t Get It.” In this morning’s paper, a letter captures two of our own reactions:

LETTER TO THE NEW YORK TIMES (12/3/14): Does anyone other than me find Nicholas Kristof’s “When Whites Just Don’t Get It” series condescending?

Who made Mr. Kristof the spokesman for blacks’ justified anger toward racism in America? I certainly don’t feel that he speaks for me and the other 40 million-plus black Americans. I think his solutions—“a new commission,” a “national conversation”—are the old bromides that won’t have any real effect on the problem, at least not while the parties in power are not talking to each other.

[...]

D— G—
New York, Nov. 30, 2014

The letter writer is “black;” we ourselves are “white.” But like the writer, we have found Kristof’s series to be quite condescending.

We agree with the letter writer in a second way. We thought the start of Sunday’s column drowned us in tedious bromides.

This is the way the column began, nagging headline included:

KRISTOF (11/30/14): When Whites Just Don’t Get It, Part 5

We Americans are a nation divided.

We feud about the fires in Ferguson, Mo., and we can agree only that racial divisions remain raw. So let’s borrow a page from South Africa and impanel a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to examine race in America.

The model should be the 9/11 commission or the Warren Commission on President Kennedy’s assassination, and it should hold televised hearings and issue a report to help us understand ourselves. Perhaps it could be led by the likes of Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and Oprah Winfrey.

Part 5! Teacher refuses to quit!

A bit later, Kristof pictures this commission conducting a “national conversation,” just as the letter writer said.

Kristof said we’re a nation divided. But as he started his column, he chose a framework which was certain to divide people even more.

He suggested we pattern our national conversation on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. Predictably, commenters found this suggestion insulting, offensive. People stopped listening fast.

Kristof imagined the panel could be led by Presidents Clinton and Bush—and by Oprah, of course. From what planet does such piffle emerge?

The last time we saw Oprah, she was asking Lindsay Lohan if she wanted to proceed with a kitschy reality show on Oprah’s cable channel. On Sunday, meanwhile, liberal commenters mocked the thought that a clown like President Bush could possibly lead this commission. And does Kristof think that President Clinton would tackle this task, even as his wife, Hillary Clinton, stages a run for the White House?

We agree with that letter writer! Kristof’s proposal struck us as a tired old bromide, dressed up in a way guaranteed to insult and offend.

Let us suggest the sheer absurdity of a “national conversation” on race—a gigantic topic in our tortured history, a gigantic topic which can’t be addressed in a mere conversation.

(In June 1997, President Clinton appointed an eight-member panel to conduct such a discussion. How many members of that panel can you name today? Can you remember a single thing they said in their final report?)

We agree with that letter writer. To us, a “national conversation” on race seems like a lazy suggestion out of the past, like the ultimate bromide.

That said, we aren’t sure why the writer, who is black, feels that Kristof’s columns have been condescending. Kristof is talking down to “whites” in his series, a group to which he himself no longer quite seems to belong.

Tomorrow, we’ll consider some of the condescension voiced in this endless series. We’ll look at (predictable) comments from readers who complained that they’ve been condescended to.

For today, let’s consider the kind of examples Kristof gave us in Sunday’s fifth installment. For this, we will refer to another letter in this morning’s Times.

What kinds of truths can our Truth Commission offer to clueless whites? The analysts groaned as Kristof cited a study they have reviewed in the past:

KRISTOF (continuing directly): We as a nation need to grapple with race because the evidence is overwhelming that racial bias remains deeply embedded in American life. Two economists, Joseph Price and Justin Wolfers, found that white N.B.A. referees disproportionally call fouls on black players, while black refs call more fouls on white players. “These biases are sufficiently large that they affect the outcome of an appreciable number of games,” Price and Wolfers wrote.

If such racial bias exists among professional referees monitored by huge television audiences, imagine what unfolds when an employer privately weighs whom to hire, or a principal decides whether to expel a disruptive student, or a policeman considers whether to pull over a driver.

Does racial bias remain deeply embedded in American life? In that example, Kristof refers to a 2007 study—a study whose methodology and results are disputed today in a letter from an NBA executive.

The analysts groaned when they saw this citation—not because they know the study to be flawed, but because they knew its findings to be quite minor.

In one way, Kristof seems to misstate those findings. But he never notes the degree to which rates of foul calls in the NBA were found to vary depending on the race of referees.

How “deeply embedded” was race found be in this particular study? According to the study, the rate of fouls seemed to vary by a factor of about four percent.

The authors said the change in the number of fouls mainly affected white players. They said they couldn’t tell if this was because white refs called “too few” calls on white players, or because black refs called too many.

Whatever! If we assume the study was valid, this is a minor distinction. It might be mildly interesting that such effects can be observed in one part of American life. But good God!

Given the sweep of societal problems connected to race and its history, we would be living in paradise if one group had two percent too much while the other had two percent too little. Given the size of our actual problems, that is a very minor bit of embedding.

Rightly or wrongly, that study found a rather minor effect. But like a magician yelling presto, Kristof amazed us with his description, failing to note how minor the observed effect actually was.

We readers were supposed to cower and cringe, ashamed of our fallen natures. This kind of paint-by-the-numbers citation strikes us as lazy and counterproductive.

Alas! There are many topics involving race which deserve careful discussion. That said, there is no point conducting such discussions unless we do so in a way to which different people will listen.

That letter writer from New York said he has found Kristof’s work “condescending.” We don’t know why he feels that way, but that’s been our reaction as well.

At least on this one basic point, Kristof’s columns have brought us together! That said, why have we found his columns condescending?

Tomorrow, we’ll try to explain. And we’ll look at comments from readers who feel condescended to.

Tomorrow: Advice from Olympus

Breaking: International Luxury Conference now underway in Miami!

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 2, 2014

Also, the latest from T: We rarely see the hard-copy version of the Sunday New York Times. Too expensive!

Two weekends ago, we saw it. We also saw the November 16 edition of T: The New York Times Style Magazine, which the paper publishes fifteen Sundays per year.

We’ll have to admit it—we were surprised by the utter foppishness of the magazine's offerings. Among a wide array of entries, we perused these:

A profile of “England’s most revered interior designer;” a report on the comeback of the adult tricycle; nine wallpaper studies, in which “the artist Leanne Shapton painted wallpaper from museums, stately homes and National Trust houses in England;” and a thought-provoking international probe by Cathy Horyn:

Famine or Feast?
FOOD BY CATHY HORYN
Is it more rewarding to subsist on broth and cold mountain treks at a German clinic for 10 days or to settle into five-course Michelin-starred meals? One writer heads to the Black Forest to weigh the merits of the purge and the binge.

This is our way of offering a belated reminder. Yesterday afternoon, this year’s New York Times International Luxury Conference got started with a cocktail party at the Mandarin Oriental in Miami.

Yes, that’s the actual name of the annual conference, which is hosted by Deborah Needleman, editor of T. This morning, the keynoter spoke:

Keynote: Blurred Lines: Art, Tech and Luxury
Art. Fashion. Technology. Sustainability. What are the points of intersection? How does each discipline inform and improve the other? What have we learned from looking outside luxury’s borders, and where are we headed?

François-Henri Pinault, C.E.O. and chairman, Kering

Interviewed by Vanessa Friedman, fashion director and chief fashion critic, The New York Times

This strange event helps us discern the secret values of our journalistic upper class. To peruse the full list of speakers, you can just click here.

Final question: what is an “international luxury conference?” Truth to tell, after all this time, we still have no real idea!

KRISTOF VILLAGE: Gene Robinson traffics in facts!

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 2, 2014

Part 2—We didn’t know that was allowed: Increasingly, our journalism is characterized by overreaction.

Also, by single vision—by the refusal to see an event from more than one point of view.

In this morning’s Washington Post, sports columnist Sally Jenkins provides a strong example. Then too, there’s the new slop at Salon.

Jenkins writes about an overreaction—the overreaction of a St. Louis police association to a gesture by five members of the St. Louis Rams.

Whatever you think of the players’ gesture, the police association overreacted in its official statement. The association asked the NFL to “discipline” the players for their gesture, which occurred at the start of Sunday’s game.

In its official statement, the association listed reasons for its reaction to the incident; those reasons are well worth reviewing. That said, the association misstated the nature of the evidence which emerged from the grand jury proceedings. Almost surely, they could have made a better case on their own behalf if they had reacted with more sorrow and a bit less anger.

Playing the role of the modern “journalist,” Jenkins proceeded to overreact to this overreaction. She found “veiled threats” from the police under every bed; that term is used in the Post’s synopsis of the column.

She ended her column as shown below. This strikes us as an example of classic single vision:

JENKINS (12/2/14): Five members of the St. Louis Rams made an edgy gesture on Sunday, and you may not agree with them. But they merely joined a long tradition of athletes using their celebrity for symbolic public protest, and the NFL was right to reject the call to punish them. Punish them for what, after all? For showing an alertness and sensitivity to current events in their community, and holding an opinion on them?

Alas! The police association didn’t say that the players should be disciplined “for showing an alertness and sensitivity to current events in their community, and holding an opinion on them.”

Jenkins skipped the nature of their complaint, which appeared in their official statement. As she did, she engaged in an act of single vision, in which all the merits and concerns involved in some case fall on the scribe’s favored side.

Single vision is everywhere in the current media landscape. Facts are selected and discarded to serve the pundit’s preferred point of view.

It’s painful to read and watch such work. And yes, this type of work is being done by pundits of the pseudo-left and the pseudo-right, despite the latest effort by Salon’s Elias Isquith to insist that this sort of thing is only done by Them.

This brings us to today’s good news. We recommend much of Gene Robinson’s work in his own column in the Washington Post.

Incredibly, Robinson attempts to traffic in information and facts. In this early part of this column, he discusses the large number of police killings in this country, as compared to the number of killings in other developed nations:

ROBINSON (12/2/14): According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, in 2013 there were 461 “justifiable homicides” by police—defined as “the killing of a felon by a law enforcement officer in the line of duty.” In all but three of these reported killings, officers used firearms.

The true number of fatal police shootings is surely much higher, however, because many law enforcement agencies do not report to the FBI database. Attempts by journalists to compile more complete data by collating local news reports have resulted in estimates as high as 1,000 police killings a year. There is no way to know how many victims, like [Michael] Brown, were unarmed.

By contrast, there were no fatal police shootings in Great Britain last year. Not one. In Germany, there have been eight police killings over the past two years. In Canada—a country with its own frontier ethos and no great aversion to firearms—police shootings average about a dozen a year.

Liberals and conservatives alike should be outraged at the frequency with which police in this country use deadly force. There is no greater power that we entrust to the state than the license to take life. To put it mildly, misuse of this power is at odds with any notion of limited government.

We wouldn’t use the term “outraged” ourselves. In part for the reason cited below, we’d use the term “deeply concerned:”

ROBINSON (continuing directly): I realize that the great majority of police officers never fire their weapons in the line of duty. Most cops perform capably and honorably in a stressful, dangerous job; 27 were killed in 2013, according to the FBI. Easy availability of guns means that U.S. police officers—unlike their counterparts in Britain, Japan or other countries where there is appropriate gun control—must keep in mind the possibility that almost any suspect might be packing heat.

The kinds of statistics Robinson cites always seem impossible, shocking. But as he notes, they reflect the “easy availability of guns” within our wider society, and the danger produced by that and other aspects of our national culture.

Police officers didn’t create those dangers, but they have to confront them. We’re always amazed by the certainty with which our headstrong pseudo-liberal youngsters, who have never served in such dangerous work, instruct and lecture American cops about the proper way they should be performing their duty.

How did you handle the danger of your job when you were a policeman? Because we’ve never been a policeman, we ourselves are somewhat slow to lecture those who are.

As far as we know, Robinson has never been a policeman either. He has served as a journalist, including in the 1990s, when he advanced the view of Establishment Washington by sliming Candidate Gore.

Perhaps because he has never served, we would say that Robinson is a bit too quick to blame police, in sweeping ways, for engaging in misconduct. Still and all, he’s presenting information today. This includes the following highlighted fact, which we found a bit surprising:

ROBINSON (continuing directly): But any way you look at it, something is wrong. Perhaps the training given officers is inadequate. Perhaps the procedures they follow are wrong. Perhaps an “us vs. them” mentality estranges some police departments from the communities they are sworn to protect.

Whatever the reason, it is hard to escape the conclusion that police in this country are much too quick to shoot. We’ve seen the heartbreaking results most recently in the fatal shooting of 28-year-old Akai Gurley, an unarmed man who was suspected of no crime, in the stairwell of a Brooklyn housing project, and the killing of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who was waving a toy gun around a park in Cleveland.

Which brings me to the issue of race. USA Today analyzed the FBI’s “justifiable homicide” statistics over several years and found that, of roughly 400 reported police killings annually, an average of 96 involved a white police officer killing a black person.

It’s amazing how stingy we humans can be with the little word “some.” How badly would it have hurt to insert that word in the passage above—to say it’s “hard to escape the conclusion that [some] police in this country are [sometimes] too quick to shoot?”

For want of the simple word “some,” Robinson may seem to attack a whole profession in that passage. Sometimes, as occurred St. Louis, police organizations respond by overreacting to such representations.

We mentioned that highlighted statistic. The available numbers are imprecise, for reasons Robinson describes. But after consuming the highly tribalized work of the past few weeks, we were surprised to be told that fewer than 25 percent of police killings in recent years have involved white officers killing black people.

(Our preference would be that no police officer ever killed anyone.)

Fewer than 25 percent? Given the way facts are currently being sifted, that seemed like a surprisingly low percentage to us. (For our preference, see above.)

But then, everyone’s vision can be skewed when fiery pundits take turn overreacting to everyone else’s overreactions and overstatements, often in service to some tribal or corporate imperative. (Salon is more pleasing when all the facts tilt in one pleasing direction.)

Tomorrow, let’s return to Nicholas Kristof and the case of those NBA refs. Kristof continues to lecture the world.

Will his lectures be helpful?

Tomorrow: A missing statistic

Supplemental: Ruth Marcus starts including some facts!

MONDAY, DECEMBER 1, 2014

The way our discourse works: What follows strikes us as very depressing. But it’s a strong example of the way our “public discourse” now works.

Last Monday, the Washington Post published a letter from a reader who was very upset. The reader said she had been in tears as she read a recent column by Ruth Marcus.

Headline included, Marcus' column had started like this:

MARCUS (11/16/14): Cruel and unusual punishment for the autistic

Reginald Latson’s path to solitary confinement began four years ago as he waited for the public library to open in Stafford County, Va.

Latson, known as Neli, has an IQ of 69 and is autistic. Teachers and therapists describe him as generally sweet and eager to please.

He is also a black man, now 22, who on the day in question was wearing a hoodie—which prompted a concerned citizen to call police about a suspicious person loitering outside the library.

The ensuing encounter should have been nothing more than a harassing annoyance. Instead, not surprising given the rigid thinking and “fight or flight” instincts characteristic of those with autism, it escalated after Latson refused to provide his name and was restrained by the police officer when he tried to leave.

For our original post on this topic, click here.

Reginald Latson was 18 years old on the day in question. According to Marcus, his teachers “describe him as generally sweet and eager to please”—but he was wearing a hoodie that day.

For that reason, a concerned citizen called police about a suspicious person loitering outside the library. Or so Marcus said, as she started her column.

Last Monday, a letter writer railed about that citizen’s behavior. We decided to click back through Marcus’ links to see what we could learn about this case.

Alas! The Post first reported this story in July 2010, in a sympathetic profile about the difficulties faced by the parents of young people with autism. In a 1354-word report, Theresa Vargas made no mention of any hoodie being involved in this matter at all.

In March 2011, Vargas reported the matter again, nine days after Latson was found guilty of four charges, including assault of a law enforcement officer and wounding in the commission of a felony. This time, Vargas mentioned the fact that Latson had been wearing a hoodie on the morning in question.

But Vargas said nothing to indicate that the hoodie had occasioned the phone call to police—a phone call which actually came from school authorities, according to the original police report. She also noted that Latson had been convicted for behavior in an unrelated incident:

VARGAS (3/13/11): Last week, prosecutors tried Latson on a breaking-and-entering charge related to an incident in 2009. In that case, prosecutors said, Latson rang the doorbell at a teenager's home. When the teen opened the door, Latson hit him and followed him inside. Latson pleaded guilty to assault last year. On Thursday, he was found guilty of breaking and entering.

"I'm not here to try to paint a pretty story about my son," but he is not the violent individual that Stafford authorities have depicted, said Latson's mother, Lisa Alexander. "Neli is not a danger to society. He doesn't belong in jail. He belongs at home."

Other violent incidents have occurred. Earlier this year, Latson, now 22, was found guilty in another such case.

Marcus may be perfectly right in her overall assessment—in her claim that young people with developmental disorders should be treated differently from other people who break the law. But in our view, her presentation of this matter was truly heinous.

She played the “arrested for wearing a hoodie” card in her first column about this incident. In doing so, she drove at least one reader to tears and spread fear about the heinous conduct directed at black youth.

It’s astounding to us that a major newspaper allows such things to occur.

Yesterday, Marcus wrote about this matter again. This time, she included more information about the various violent incidents in which Latson has been involved.

Even there, we’d have to say she put a heavy spin on these events. But we ask you to consider that original column.

We can’t tell you how Latson should be treated. We’re asking you to think about Marcus’s conduct.

In that original column, Marcus did some of the most egregious picking-and-choosing of information we have ever seen. Making matters much worse, she introduced the inflammatory claim that Latson, a sweet and gentle soul, had been reported to the police because he was wearing a hoodie.

A reader was soon in tears. An editor ran her letter under this headline: “Wearing a hoodie while black.”

People believe what they read in the Post. They should be warned about that.

For the record, levels of violence: In the incident Marcus described, a police officer was injured so badly that he had to retire. In March 2011, Vargas reported this:

“Latson's attorneys didn't dispute what had happened. Instead, they presented an insanity defense in court. They said Latson—in whom intermittent explosive disorder and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder had also been diagnosed—could not control his behavior because of an ‘irresistible impulse.’”

Marcus didn't have room for that in her original column. Plus, it would have harmed her heartwarming theme.

We feel bad for young people with problems. But just compare that passage, from her own link, to the portrait Marcus drew in that original column.

Marcus was posing as the journalistic hero in that original column. Most egregiously, she was toying with a popular meme, a meme involving a hoodie.

We think her conduct was very bad, to the point of being heinous. But as everyone knows, this is the way our “discourse” increasingly works.

KRISTOF VILLAGE: Himmler revealed!

MONDAY, DECEMBER 1, 2014

Part 1—Our mental and moral powers: We live in a very challenging time.

In part for that reason, we were struck by a letter we read in Saturday morning’s Washington Post.

The letter was written by a man who “was an appellate immigration judge on the Board of Immigration Appeals from 1995 to 2003.” He said that he’d been “deeply offended” by a front-page report in the Post.

The letter writer still works for the Justice Department. We include the headline over his letter. We assume the headline was prepared by the Post:

A profile of an extremist

I was deeply offended that The Post would devote a front-page article to Kris Kobach [“From Kansas, a challenge to the powers of a president,” Nov. 23]. Before he became Kansas secretary of state, Kobach directed legal strategies for groups nurtured by anti-immigration crusader John Tanton, who hopes to preserve white supremacy, and worked on initiatives such as Arizona’s and Pennsylvania’s statutes targeting undocumented immigrants; both were ruled unconstitutional by federal courts. In Kansas, he has undertaken many attempts to disenfranchise minority voters.

What’s next? Portraits of Himmler and Pol Pot as German and Cambodian conservative legal experts? After all, they, too, were attempting to remove “foreign” influences from their nations, albeit by extreme measures we fortunately do not tolerate in the United States.

On line, the letter included a link to that front-page report. In referring to Kobach as “an extremist,” some editor went beyond the charges made by the offended reader.

As a general matter, we don’t share Kobach’s views, to the extent that we understand them. We wouldn’t vote for him if we lived in Kansas.

On the other hand, we found nothing especially strange about the Post’s front-page report. It concerned an elected official who has been a significant figure in the news for the past several years.

Especially given his station in life, we found it strange that the letter writer was “deeply offended” by that front-page report. We found it even stranger that the Post printed his letter in the form it did, with its fiery comparison to Himmler and Pol Pot.

By now, pretty much everyone has agreed—it doesn’t make a lot of sense to compare people to Hitler. But so what? Replace the “t” with a double-m and you’re good to go in the Post!

Given the norms of our journalism, the publication of that letter struck us as very strange. But then, such fiery statements are becoming the norm in our fraying discourse.

More examples:

In a separate clump of letters that day, the Post let five readers state their reactions to the grand jury decision in Ferguson, Missouri.

You can review those letters yourself; they state different reactions to the events of the case. For ourselves, we were struck by the certainty with which the various readers announced what they had found as they groped their own part of the elephant, by the way they sometimes filtered facts to make their storylines stronger.

Can the media “get the Ferguson storyline correct?” One reader seemed to feel that they could—and that he knew what that correct “storyline” was.

Another reader felt she knew where “the focus” should be in the case. The focus shouldn’t be on the justice system, she said:

“The focus belongs on the parents of young men such as Michael Brown who failed to teach their son not to steal, not to walk in the street, not to disrespect the reasonable order of a police officer and not to reach for a police officer’s weapon.”

We don’t agree with that at all. In a larger sense, is there only one storyline, only one focus, in a matter like this? So those readers implied.

A third reader had a very different reaction to the case. She seemed to refer to the case as a “murder.” She then voiced a sad lament:

“The sad thing is that, even if the grand jury had indicted this officer, it has been proved over and over again that juries rarely convict police officers. The U.S. public has repeatedly declared that police can gun down anyone, regardless of guilt or race or anything else, and, if the police are brought to trial, they almost always walk. And anyone who guns down a young black man seems to be considered justified as long as he claims he felt threatened.”

Should Darren Wilson have been indicted, then convicted, for “gunning down” Michael Brown? This reader voiced no doubts.

All around the discourse in the past week, we’ve seen a world in which various people are “full of passionate intensity.”

Various players are hunting, and sometimes creating, their Himmlers. Doubts and complexities tend not to get expressed.

So far, we’ve talked about letter writers. Yesterday, the certainty spread to the professional writers in both the New York Times and the Washington Post.

For our money, Nicholas Kristof’s latest column was most instructive of all. Kristof was full of certainty, as he often is, and he offered some silly statistics.

We’re increasingly struck by Kristof’s work, which strikes us as lazy and poor. Tomorrow, we’ll start to look at his claims and suggestions—and at the predictable barrel of comments his latest effort engendered.

Increasingly, Kristof’s work strikes us as lazy, type-by-the-numbers, poor. We aren’t sure it provides the best model for these challenging times.

Tomorrow: Concerning those NBA refs!