Our guest post today comes from "smintheus", a long-time friend of the Newshoggers who usually blogs at Unbossed.com.
On Monday Jeffrey Goldberg added a bizarre and nearly incomprehensible note to a highly controversial post at The Atlantic. The note sought to explain and justify an earlier, unacknowledged revision to the piece whose effect had been to make him appear less foolish. He maintains that he misled readers inadvertently by accidentally deleting the word �UPDATE� from that revision. His account was far from adequate and refers to obscure technical difficulties. Goldberg even said that he couldn�t really understand what had happened as he repeatedly revised the post the previous Friday. He promised to look into his electronic trail to figure the situation out.
Since then, however, Goldberg has added nothing to his garbled explanation. It should be a simple matter to extract from The Atlantic�s servers a record of his updates to that post, if in fact it would corroborate and clarify his flimsy account. As things are, Goldberg stands accused of deliberately doctoring a post to mask how outrageous his original post had been. Prominent journalists such as Jay Rosen have called him to task. And yet four days later Goldberg still has produced no evidence on his own behalf. His colleagues at The Atlantic remain silent as well.
There are detailed descriptions of this scandal here and here.
The facts as I understand them are as follows: Last Friday afternoon Goldberg posted a two-paragraph screed, �Mumbai Comes to Norway,� blaming the attacks unequivocally on Islamic terrorists. When events demonstrated how reckless he�d been, Goldberg added a third paragraph raising the possibility of right-wing terrorism. By not labeling this as an update, he left readers to conclude that he was just exploring multiple theories rather than using the massacre to make a bold pronouncement about the worldwide jihadist danger. Later that evening, beginning around 8 PM, Goldberg began adding 4 further paragraphs on stray thoughts, each of which he did carefully label as an �UPDATE�. At the same time he also added �(UPDATED)� to the title. So he was capable of noting updates when there was nothing to be gained from not doing so.
On Saturday, Goldberg posted a roundabout defense of his decision to rush to judgment, �On Suspecting al Qaeda in the Norway Attacks.� It is characteristically disingenuous, particularly about what he had written in �Mumbai�.
On Monday, when he learned (via James Fallows) that I had found cached evidence that he�d made those unacknowledged changes to �Mumbai�, Goldberg hurriedly added another update to the post. This was the aforementioned bizarre explanation for not having labeled the first revision as an �update�. It is so ridiculous it really needs to be seen to be believed.
The Atlantic needs to address this disgrace. The �Mumbai� post was reprehensible to begin with. The doctoring of it is a further scandal. Goldberg�s ridiculous excuse-mongering makes matters worse. His refusal to apologize for any of it is worse still.
And as if that weren�t shameful enough, his colleagues at The Atlantic have some answering to do for ignoring or excusing all of this. On Saturday James Fallows called for the Washington Post to apologize for a Jennifer Rubin post that, like Goldberg�s, used the Norway attacks to propagandize about Islamic terrorism. His call was seconded by two other Atlantic writers. But none of them has so much as mentioned Goldberg�s reprehensible �Mumbai� post. In correspondence, Fallows bobbed and weaved when pressed about holding Goldberg to basic journalistic standards.
So will Goldberg and The Atlantic ever properly address this bundle of scandals?
Originally posted here.
Good Job
ReplyDeleteGoldberg and what I thought was general decay in the writing and articles in The Atlantic were 2 of the reasons I dropped my long term subscription to the magazine. I was unaware that Goldberg had demonstrated his bias so openly last Friday, as I try to ignore anything with an Atlantic tag on or near it. I'm sorry to hear that James Fallows is showing such lack of character. From him, Fallows, I would have expected some honesty.
ReplyDeleteEnd result of this snafu will be that Goldberg will cry and bluster that "bad" people are picking on him, being dishonest, and not following the mythical set of rules that exist only in the heads of complete screw-ups for pretending they are journalists. Also The Atlantic will promote him or give him a big raise which seems to be the neoliberal & neoconservative method of punishment for their brethren.
James Fallows finally responds here to the allegations of wrongdoing and hypocrisy. As I say in an update to the crosspost, it�s pretty thin stuff.
ReplyDeleteHe states that Goldberg was having connectivity problems �that morning� and would have to be crazy to lie about the circumstances of his unlabeled update to �Mumbai� (from later in the day).
Quoth Fallows: "Also, our system logs changes, and any of us would be additionally crazy, knowing that, to pretend that something happened if it didn't."
Setting aside the fact that Goldberg has said some pretty crazy things � for example, rushing to blame the Norway attacks on Muslim terrorists � apparently neither Fallows nor Goldberg has made any effort to dig out those logs to prove that Goldberg misled his readers accidentally as he claims. As I�ve noted repeatedly, it should be a simple thing to produce that evidence if it actually backs up Goldberg�s story. Further, Goldberg said that his memory is hazy and his convoluted account is nearly incomprehensible. So why is nobody at The Atlantic trying to clarify what is otherwise an extreme embarrassment for them?
As regards the issue of whether he should condemn Goldberg�s rush to use the massacre to score points, Fallows argues (a) that others did not condemn Goldberg either, and (b) he didn�t see �Mumbai� until Goldberg had already tried to walk back some of its extremism.
Left unaddressed, I think, is whether Fallows and The Atlantic should condemn it now that he realizes it was originally as indefensible a post as the Jennifer Rubin piece he denounced. Goldberg has not admitted that he was wrong to post it. Quite the contrary, he continues to defend the decision. Goldberg is still trying to portray the controversy disingenuously as criticism that he merely �suspected� al Qaeda�s involvement in Norway. That is intellectually dishonest (not to say crazy given that people can go back and read what he wrote).
Fallows also points out that he sometimes disagrees with others at The Atlantic over US policy, but then so what? Seems a distraction from the question of whether journalists need to criticize their colleagues for journalistic lapses.
Thanks Ron.
ReplyDeletegeoff, it could be said that Goldberg is afloat in a sea of dishonesty.
I assume James Fallows must be away with the fairies. Why else would he make a statement such as "... any of us would be additionally crazy, knowing that, to pretend that something happened if it didn't." He must be assuming that anyone living or near death believes that any corporate media is honest and doesn't, on a daily basis, pretend the earth is flat or some more radical fact in its copy. Clearly he's spent too much time in Japan and China and has, himself, lost touch with Western reality, as far as our media is now, relative to it formerly, maybe, honourable past.
ReplyDeleteAlso has he not heard of the Murdock fiasco in the UK. Oh, but that, or similar types of shenanigans, couldn't go on in the hallowed halls of North American media mansions.
Turns out that Goldberg did finally respond to criticisms of his integrity...by slipping yet another update into his post, without fanfare. Here he is sounding like Richard Nixon in his Checkers Speech:
ReplyDelete�UPDATE ON THE UPDATE ON THE UPDATE (Thursday the 28th): Jay Rosen has pointed out that the previous paragraphs read like gibberish. He's mostly right. Here's a shorter version: I posted, updated,, erased the post by mistake, tried to restore the post, left things out of the post, then fixed the post. There are people out there -- people who are opposed to me on ideological grounds -- who are accusing me of intentionally doctoring the post. They offer no proof, however. All I can say is that the screw-ups were inadvertent.�
"Goldberg�s ridiculous excuse-mongering makes matters worse. His refusal to apologize for any of it is worse still."
ReplyDeleteThat the neo-cons SOP.