In a “letter” in The National Post, Mr. Corcoran provided
some selected excerpts he believes prove I have “accused” Margaret
Wente of “sexism”.
Of
course things taken out of context can be made to do almost anything. Corcoran’s examples omit essential context, such as hyperlinks and the errors the comments were intended to address. I’ll
take them here (in reverse order):
3) In example 3, Corcoran
highlights what he feels is the smoking feminist gun, quoting this:
“In the meantime, perhaps the
Globe could do their part to address the situation by hiring a young male
editor for Margaret.
In the
column
in question, Ms. Wente had
written, "More U.S. men have gone on disability than found work"
(adding little to a previous Hanna Rosin feature on ‘The Death of Men’ and the disappearance of traditional male jobs).
The point of my post was to show that her figures appeared to be wrong, and should
read, as they do in this Fox report:
Fox News: More Americans went on disability than
found jobs over the last three months, according to fresh figures crunched by
the Senate Budget Committee.
There
is a difference between the ‘number of Americans’ quoted in an official statistic
and the ‘number of men’. Wente’s
sentence appears to be a mis-quote or statistical error, as deserving of a correction from the Globe as any mis-spelling.
Mr.
Corcoran, in his zeal to find a feminist under every bed (post), omits the post's point – the altered statistic. He focuses instead on a passing line in
relation to the error, which suggests that if Wente needs an intern to verify a
quote, she might hire a male, since her version of the stat may have had the
effect of increasing the number of unemployed males. I also make an
observation about whether the ‘Republican war on women’ (widely quoted term – didn’t
invent it) has any relation to resentment about disappearing male
manufacturing jobs. This is hardly
"accusing" Wente of “sexism”.
2) National Post readers would be
unaware of the hyperlink in relation to the word "female" in the sentence "This blogger's female" that Corcoran highlights (perhaps
that was the intent). Links provide context. Omitting them changes the meaning by removing its reference. In this case
“female” links to a widely discussed Margaret Wente column in which she claims
blogging is a uniquely guy thing - that bloggers are male - not an article I found objectionable, but sort of funny in that it was a female "anonymous blogger"
involved in the
controversy under discussion. Corcoran removes the irony by
removing the link to Wente’s previous column.
1) Oh, come on. Does this amount
to an "accusation" of "sexism"? Using Ms. Wente's description
of Stephen Pinker, I asked about a serious omission on
her part:
Why are statistics from the same organization (the U.S. Bureau
of Justice) “the best there are” when Steven Pinker uses them, but “ridiculous”
when used by the American Association of University Women?
That post refers to a problem given more scope here;
Ms.Wente’s failure to cite the source of statistics used to disparage a women’s
organization. Here are the relevant ethical
guidelines:
“It is dishonest to base
an editorial on half –truth”, says the code of conduct of the Ontario Press
Council. “The Press Council supports free expression of opinion that purports
to be based on statistics but believes that readers have the right to know
where the statistics come from.”
Half-truths
are indeed dishonest, as are quotes taken out of context.
