September 26, 2018 at 5:14 p.m.
Swing low, sweet media
Swing low, sweet media
In the first instance, we couldn't stomach the liberal media's partisan collusion to write a collective editorial taking down the Trump administration on false pretenses. The editorials were ostensibly written to defend open government, but in reality they were shilling for the agenda of the Democratic Party.
Then along came The New York Times with an anonymous op-ed purportedly written by an insider at the White House, who bragged about his or her attempts to thwart the "reckless" Trump agenda.
Well, that reckless agenda is either within constitutional boundaries, in which case our nameless, gutless author was attempting to thwart the administration of an elected president, or it wasn't, in which case the author should have become a whistleblower and stood up to warn us exactly what is endangering our republic.
In any event, the story belonged in the news section if it was worthy, and what was really reckless was The Times allowing anonymous speculation and allegations to be published on its editorial pages.
Now comes The New Yorker, the once high-flying chariot in the sky of journalism, going with a hit piece that even the shameless New York Times wouldn't publish - a 35-year-old allegation that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh exposed himself to a woman at a college party, pushing his penis in her face amid howls of college laughter.
So why not publish it? After all, this is the MeToo era. Well, let us count the ways.
First, Deborah Ramirez wasn't too sure it was Kavanaugh at all. Ramirez says she was drunk and foggy and on the floor and there were gaps in her memory. We bet there were.
Except she became more certain after she spent six days with a lawyer - a lawyer, mind you, not a therapist - "assessing her memories." Certain enough to tell her story to the press, even though, as we later found out, even then she wasn't sure it was Kavanaugh.
The New Yorker story, written by Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer, was flimsier than even Ramirez's memory. Not only could they not find any witnesses to the event, they couldn't find anybody who could even say that Kavanaugh was at the party.
It's important at this juncture to make a few points. Just because a woman does not come forward for years does not mean that the event didn't happen, or that she is unbelievable. We should be far past this point. Most women simply do not make up stories of sexual assault.
That's not to say that no women ever make up stories, or that every woman's story deserves to find print even when they are believable, and that's what makes these cases troubling. We all know the obstacles women face in coming forward, from feelings of humiliation to fears of retaliation and character assassination and more, and they need not be recounted here.
Still, the person who is accused has rights, too. A serious charge of sexual assault should never be cavalierly published. It must walk with corroborative legs.
Good journalists do have tools to help them assess these kinds of stories and decide when to publish and when not to publish, even when the person did not come forward for years and when a police report is not available.
One is, who did the person tell? Many if not most times an assaulted person will tell a family member or a close friend or a therapist, not many years later but at the time it happened. Multiple sources told years earlier can corroborate that the person is not recently making up a story.
Such tools aren't perfect, to be sure, and at the end of the day sometimes there simply is not enough corroboration to move a story forward, even when the journalist believes the accuser.
That was the case with The New Yorker piece. In the report, not one of the people Ramirez says was there when the incident happened can remember it.
Nor did she tell others, at least that the magazine could find. A former female friend put it this way: "This is a woman I was best friends with. We shared intimate details of our lives. And I was never told this story by her, or by anyone else. It never came up. I didn't see it; I never heard of it happening."
With absolutely no corroboration, not one scintilla of evidence the incident ever took place beyond a single source, the story should not have been published.
None of this is to say Ramirez is lying. It is to say there's no evidence that she is telling the truth.
Did something akin to what Ramirez described happen to her? Likely. Does that obligate the media to let her accuse someone without evidence? Definitely not.
We owe it to victims everywhere to believe stories of assault, but we owe it to truth and justice to not merely believe but to verify. We must, because those falsely accused can never get their lives back, either.
That's why The New York Times did not publish the story, as it explained: "The Times had interviewed several dozen people over the past week in an attempt to corroborate her story, and could find no one with firsthand knowledge. Ms. Ramirez herself contacted former Yale classmates asking if they recalled the incident and told some of them that she could not be certain Mr. Kavanaugh was the one who exposed himself."
That put the story to rest for The Times and it should have for The NewYorker. The point is, Ramirez has the right to tell her story and to assess her memories. But The New Yorker does not have an obligation to simply pass on her unsubstantiated claims. In fact, in this case, they had a responsibility not to. What's sad about this story is not that Ramirez came forward, it's that The New Yorker, in its rush to sink Kavanaugh's appointment and to have another big scoop, used her for its own partisan and corporate agenda. A respectable publication would have explained to her why journalism standards could not allow the story to go forward without more.
What's even sadder is that by using Ramirez, The New Yorker has victimized the entire MeToo movement, and made it harder for women to be taken seriously when they do come forward with credible claims.
The magazine has also victimized all good journalists, and made it harder for them to be taken seriously when they do report credible claims and stories.
As we write, a third accuser has come forward against Kavanaugh.
Who knows at this writing if her claims are any more credible, but what we do know is that with each lousy piece of journalism, it becomes harder for the American people to believe either the accusers or the accused or the media.
Indeed, the media is the least believed of all. And that's why this past week will be remembered as the week The New Yorker, once the great beacon in the journalism sky, publishing the likes of EB White, Seymour Hersh, Lillian Ross, and John McPhee, swung low with its once-sweet-and-true chariot, not to take us home, but to condemn all reporters and publications to the dustbin of American journalism.
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