They’re just making up the rules as they go, aren’t they?
They’re just making up the rules as they go, aren’t they?
‘I f they didn’t have double standards, they’d have no standards at all.”
That used to be a common joke about certain news organizations.
At this point, however, double standards would be preferable to whatever it is that we have now, which is best described as “making it up as they go.”
Where once there was lopsided coverage, but still predictable and relatively explicable editorial standards, there is now a Calvinball-style approach to reporting the news, with news journalism “rules” and “standards” being invented and discarded daily, and all in a clumsy effort to placate and protect certain parties. Unsurprisingly, the on-the-spot rule changes and fly-by-night editorial standards tend to go in one direction only, depending on whether the editors and journalists consider the story an affront to liberal pieties.
Major media coverage of Claudine Gay’s downfall as president of Harvard, for example, has been an absolute mess, even as irrefutable evidence of her serial plagiarism became impossible to deny or ignore.
For starters, and as discussed earlier, major media tried initially to dismiss the story, relying on the say-so of Gay’s colleagues and peers who claimed that the scandal was no scandal at all. In fact, in its very first attempt at covering the story, the New York Times published a report titled, “Harvard Clears Its President of ‘Research Misconduct’ After Plagiarism Charges.”
The New York Times is an ostensibly serious and professional newsroom. As such, it should be familiar with the concept of plagiarism. It presumably has the resources and talent available both to investigate and recognize clear-cut examples of plagiarism when presented. Yet, rather than investigate for themselves multiple allegations of malfeasance, the Times chose in its first crack at the story to allow Gay’s friends and allies to make a determination on the plagiarism charges, a determination the paper should have been able to make for itself. And it’s not as if the evidence of Gay’s plagiarism was under lock and key. The proof was readily available online at the time of the New York Times’ initial reporting. (Along with every other major outlet, including the Washington Post and the Associated Press, the Times was scooped on the story of Gay’s serial plagiarism by journalists at smaller, right-of-center outlets, including the Washington Free Beacon and National Review, and activists/writers Christopher Rufo and Christopher Brunet.) The Times simply chose at the outset not to investigate and to accept the word of Gay’s peers and subordinates. This would be like the Washington Post reporting several days into the Watergate scandal that it was not, in fact, a scandal, because Spiro Agnew said so.
Weirdly, the New York Times wasn’t alone in this. The Boston Globe, right across the Charles from Harvard, likewise relied on assurances from Gay’s allies that the scandal wasn’t one.
But this is not even the worst of the coverage. Some in the press still act as if they don’t know plagiarism when they see it. Others still pretend that plagiarism, an issue familiar to every news organization, is now suddenly so nebulous that only outside experts can pass judgment. Others still insist that the real story is not one of obvious corruption in higher education, but that shadowy, right-wing saboteurs walk among us.
Remember: The story of Gay’s downfall is no more complicated than people noticing that she used other people’s words and didn’t acknowledge it, clearly violating Harvard’s own plagiarism standards.
Yet, behold this Washington Post news blurb:
“The resignation of Claudine Gay as president of Harvard University marks the culmination of a conservative war on higher education, long fought on campuses but this time triggered by hard questions from Republicans in Washington and their allies.”
You are being asked once again to believe that the real story here is not the wrongdoing, but that the “wrong” people noticed said wrongdoing. Imagine a headline that read, “The expulsion of George Santos as a member of Congress marks the culmination of the Left’s war on Republican lawmakers, long fought at the ballot box but this time triggered by hard questions from an ethics committee in Washington.” See how stupid that sounds?
Also, one cannot help but laugh at the Washington Post’s reference to the “hard questions from Republicans” that Gay faced at her congressional hearing. The “hard” question that earned Gay so much initial criticism was, “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment, yes or no?” Why, not even the Sphinx herself could ever devise such a riddle!
Politico, meanwhile, reported that “the right got a strong dose of satisfaction by engineering the departure of the head of the most influential university in the world.”
And by “engineering,” Politico means, “People pointed out that she plagiarized.”
Then, there is the Associated Press, which appears to have suffered some sort of nervous breakdown as a result of Gay’s professional indiscretions.
“Harvard president’s resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges: plagiarism,” reads the headline to the AP’s report on Gay’s resignation.
Let’s try this again: “George Santos’s expulsion from Congress highlights new Democratic weapon against colleagues: fraud.”
In the story itself, the AP alleged that, in referring to Gay as having been “scalped,” Christopher Rufo treated her as “a trophy of violence,” adding that scalping was “a gruesome practice taken up by white colonists who sought to eradicate Native Americans” (an obviously warped rendition of historical fact, one that AP editors later stealthily corrected).
Also, in the same story, the AP invented a caveat to temper the nature of the plagiarism scandal: In the case of Gay, it reported, “the outrage came not from her academic peers but her political foes, led by conservatives who put her career under intense scrutiny.”
Since when has the origin of a factual claim ever stopped a journalist from reporting a factual claim? As Charlie Cooke noted earlier, this brand-new, made-up-on-the-spot standard for determining the seriousness of a given story would absolve even Richard Nixon. Indeed, if the newsworthiness of allegations of wrongdoing is to be doubted or sniffed at simply because the allegations came from critics of the alleged wrongdoer, then news coverage of the 2024 presidential election will be the dullest in history. Opposition research will go right out the window, even if it’s 100 percent the ironclad truth.
Elsewhere, in an email sent following news of Gay’s resignation, the AP outlined its coverage plan, writing, “Harvard President Claudine Gay weathered attacks on her congressional testimony on antisemitism, only to resign after mounting allegations of plagiarism pushed largely by conservatives. In an era of widespread access to plagiarism software and unprecedented distrust of higher education, experts say conservatives could use Gay’s situation as a playbook to attack other leaders in higher education.”
Is — is everything all right at the AP?
Or is this just the new normal for news organizations that have no editorial guidance aside from, “Who benefits from our coverage?”
Apparently, “Who benefits?” is the new standard.