Associated Press murders media ethics in report on Harvard leader’s resignation
Quin Hillyer
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The Associated Press, despite boasting many excellent individual reporters, long ago lowered standards and became, at least at its top levels, a frequent purveyor of toxic and dishonest left-wing agitprop. Even by those lowered standards, though, the Associated Press’s main story on the resignation of Harvard University President Claudine Gay was a disgrace.
Indeed, even after it was updated to mitigate some of its worst flaws, it was so full of bias and inaccuracies that it read like a slipshod legal defense brief for Gay grafted onto a Harvard Lampoon satire of woke reporting.
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For an organization that for decades took pride in being a reliable, just-the-facts, no-bias provider of hard news to almost every journalistic outlet in the nation, the story on Gay marks the lowest of new lows.
A primary rule of good journalism is that facts come first, motives afterward. In other words, facts speak for themselves as either accurate or not, no matter who first brings them to light. For years, though, liberal news outlets have specialized in the form of reporting derided by critics as the “conservatives pounce” model. If left-wing activists allege bad but undeniable facts about conservatives, those facts are treated as the main (or only) story, but if conservative allegations about bad liberal behavior prove true, the outlet makes the main story about how mean it is of conservatives to “pounce” on the facts to serve their own political ends.
Within just a few paragraphs, then, the story all but defends the original misbehavior while treating the conservative whistleblowers as suspects or outright “bad guys.” To the utmost extreme, that’s what the Associated Press did in its Jan. 2-3 overnight story about Harvard’s president.
The original headline itself is a perfect example of the “conservatives pounce” formulation: “Harvard president’s resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges: plagiarism.” As if plagiarism is an issue only because conservatives make it one, rather than being for well over a century one of the cardinal sins of both academia and journalism.
The story’s first sentence (before the Associated Press covered it up with an unacknowledged update) did admit plagiarism as “a cardinal sin in academia,” but put the “sin” in the light of “a possible new weapon in conservative attacks on higher education.” In the original third paragraph, the whole story is about the supposedly bad, racially tinged motives of “conservatives who sought to oust Gay and put her career under intense scrutiny in hopes of finding a fatal flaw.” It says her “detractors,” apparently wildly, say Gay “got the top job in large part because she is a Black woman.”
Already, by the way, the story was playing fast and loose with the facts. It said “the plagiarism allegations came not from her academic peers but her political foes,” even though they originated through a news investigation by the New York Post and even though CNN, hardly a conservative outlet, did yeoman’s work confirming the significant extent of Gay’s plagiarism.
The story went from slanted to absurd (and ungrammatical) soon thereafter. It noted that conservative activist Christopher Rufo had posted that Gay had successfully been “‘scalped,’ as if Gay was a trophy of violence, invoking a gruesome practice taken up by white colonists who sought to eradicate Native Americans.”
Read that again: Even setting aside the grammatical point that the “was” should have been “were,” this is a ludicrous formulation. In what version of history were white settlers primarily responsible for the practice of scalping, which had almost entirely disappeared from Europe centuries earlier but which was a preexisting, widely used practice among Native Americans, against both each other and the new European settlers? And while some early white settlers paid friendlier Indians to scalp unfriendly ones, the use of scalping was hardly a central “practice” used for “eradication” of the natives.
A later version of the Associated Press story did not correct this obvious historical idiocy, but it did add, as an afterthought, a new clause admitting the practice was “also used by some tribes against their enemies.” The effect was less to correct the record than to reemphasize that the primary blame for scalping lay on the “white colonists” who rarely practiced it — rather than on the Indians who, rather than “also” using it, as the Associated Press wrote, actually long had made it a regular and prominent habit. The message was obvious: “white” people are evil oppressors, while non-whites never get blame for anything.
Of course one could write whole volumes, accurately, about how Europeans mistreated Native Americans, but why insert this historically crazy inaccuracy about the origin of New World scalping into the narrative about Gay’s resignation?
Meanwhile, back to the main theme of the Associated Press story, a few paragraphs of basic facts were followed by renewed assertions that the real problem was “how the plagiarism came to light: as part of a coordinate campaign to discredit Gay … in part because of her involvement in efforts for racial justice on campus.” Seriously, the Associated Press included in a supposedly straight news story that conservative complaints about plagiarism are actually motivated by opposition to “racial justice.”
From that smear, the next sentence not only left facts behind, but asserted something entirely counterfactual. Gay’s resignation, the Associated Press reported, “came after calls for her ouster from prominent conservatives including Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), a Harvard alumna, and Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge fund manager who has donated millions to Harvard.”
Uh, no. Ackman is a noted liberal, not a conservative. He is a massive donor to abortion provider Planned Parenthood, to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Democratic National Committee, and to Democratic Sens. Chuck Schumer, Richard Blumenthal, and Bob Menendez, among others. For the Associated Press to misstate a basic, easily checkable fact about Ackman’s political allegiances, in favor of the apparent assumption that “billionaire” and “conservative” are synonymous, is journalistic sloppiness of epic proportions.
The Associated Press’s calumny against conservatives continued, with another paragraph saying that “Republican detractors have sought to … banish initiatives that make colleges more welcoming to students of color, disabled students and the LGBTQ+ community. They also have aimed to limit how race and gender are discussed in classrooms.” Really? Is it really a fact that the leftist initiatives make colleges more “welcoming” in that way, rather than that there is a serious debate about the effects of diversity, equity, and inclusion policies? And is it really conservatives who are particularly eager to “limit how race and gender are discussed in classrooms”? Last I checked, college instructors and students all across the country have been disciplined for how they discuss “race and gender” not because the discussions upset conservative sensibilities but because they “triggered” students and faculty on the Left. Speech codes regarding race and gender are almost always and everywhere a tool of the Left, not of the Right.
Still, even with this smear blaming conservatives for restricting speech, the Associated Press wasn’t done. The story continues with paragraph after paragraph reiterating that conservatives are the aggressors, interspersed with quote after quote from liberal sources either trying to explain away Gay’s plagiarism as not particularly serious or saying that the real motive for opposition to Gay was that she is black. One source complained that if you are a black person in academia, “you always have to be twice, three times as good.”
As if avoiding multiple instances of blatant plagiarism is a high bar with which only black scholars are confronted.
The final word was afforded to a source who claimed there is “a right-wing political attack on higher education right now, which feels like an existential threat to the academic freedom” there, after which the source continued in that vein for several paragraphs.
Not a single conservative was quoted, anywhere in the article, to respond to these smears. Not one.
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By the end of this Associated Press story, plagiarist Claudine Gay is clearly and unambiguously presented as the victim of a right-wing hit job motivated by racial animus. There are no doubts about the narrative, no counterarguments, no attempts at balance, no acknowledgment that even the slimmest chance exists that conservatives have legitimate concerns about plagiarism, about Gay, or about the state of academia in general.
This wasn’t a news story; it was a sophomoric left-wing screed. But at least it was original, rather than taking work from other house organs of the Left such as the New York Times and then, well, copying it.