{"id":175893,"date":"2020-11-01T19:06:00","date_gmt":"2020-11-02T00:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/11\/01\/speaking-of-privilege\/"},"modified":"2020-11-01T19:06:00","modified_gmt":"2020-11-02T00:06:00","slug":"speaking-of-privilege","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/11\/01\/speaking-of-privilege\/","title":{"rendered":"Speaking of Privilege\u2026\u2026\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the 1990s, there were a whole series of <i>Wunderkind<\/i> at <i>The New Republic<\/i>, Ruth Shalit and Stephen Glass who were later revealed to be fabulists and\/or plagiarists.<\/p>\n<p>The fact that the magazine was a disaster under the ownership of racist Marty Peretz, is of little interest today, except for the fact that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2020\/11\/01\/business\/media\/atlantic-ruth-shalit-barrett.html\">Ruth Shalit, now Ruth Shalit Barrett, is still getting her stories into prominent publications<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>In this case, it was <i>The Atlantic<\/i> which published an article from her about parents getting their children into fencing to get them into top flight schools.<\/p>\n<p>It turns out that it was (once again)&nbsp; she made sh%$ up.<\/p>\n<p>Seriously, if you are a white person who went to the Ivy League, you are the equivalent of&nbsp; a &#8220;Made Man&#8221; in the Mafia.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s the only explanation as to why she gets any non-fiction writing now:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: #2b00fe;\">The Atlantic on Sunday took the extraordinary step of retracting an article by Ruth Shalit Barrett, who was a rising young political reporter in the 1990s when accusations of plagiarism derailed her career as an associate editor at The New Republic.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe cannot attest to the trustworthiness and credibility of the author, and therefore we cannot attest to the veracity of the article,\u201d The Atlantic said in an <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/magazine\/archive\/2020\/11\/squash-lacrosse-niche-sports-ivy-league-admissions\/616474\/\">editor\u2019s note<\/a> that it updated on Sunday night.<\/p>\n<p>The buzzy article, which was published online last month and appears in the magazine\u2019s November print edition, chronicles a world of wealthy parents in the Connecticut suburbs obsessed with prodding their children into niche sports like fencing, crew and squash in hopes of getting them into Ivy League schools.<\/p>\n<p>In the editor\u2019s note, The Atlantic said that its fact-checking department had thoroughly rechecked the article, which was more than 6,000 words, speaking with more than 40 sources and independently corroborating information.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBut we now know that the author misled our fact-checkers, lied to our editors, and is accused of inducing at least one source to lie to our fact-checking department,\u201d the note said. \u201cWe believe that these actions fatally undermined the effectiveness of the fact-checking process. It is impossible for us to vouch for the accuracy of this article. This is what necessitates a full retraction. We apologize to our readers.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><i>The Atlantic<\/i>, went so far as listing her name as, &#8220;Ruth S. Barrett,&#8221; as the byline, because, after all, she went to Princeton.<\/p>\n<p>I get that Shalit is a talented writer, but why any editor would ever publish her in non-fiction is a marker of just how dysfunctional the current caste system is in the united states.<\/p>\n<p>I may be the, &#8220;<b><span style=\"font-size: 100%; font-variant: small-caps;\">Worst Writer on the Internet<\/span><\/b>,&#8221; but I would be a better choice for any reporting, because I don&#8217;t make sh%$ up.  (Though I freely admit that my ideology can seem a bit deranged at times, and this this would necessarily shape my coverage.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the 1990s, there were a whole series of Wunderkind at The New Republic, Ruth Shalit and Stephen Glass who were later revealed to be fabulists and\/or plagiarists. The fact that the magazine was a disaster under the ownership of racist Marty Peretz, is of little interest today, except for the fact that Ruth Shalit, &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[368,490,591],"class_list":["post-175893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-corruption","tag-hack-journalism","tag-privilege"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175893"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=175893"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175893\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}