The Chronicles of the Chronicle: Part II

    On May 8th, I wrote about the firing of blogger Naomi Schaefer Riley from the Brainstorm blog of the Chronicle of Higher Education.  Rather than conducting an examination of Riley's work, I focused on another brainstorm blogger Laurie Essig to see if her writing "conform[ed] to the journalistic standards and civil tone" that Liz McMillen had cited in her reasons for firing Riley.  My investigation showed that a post Essig had written the same week as the Riley controversy raged was not merely uncivil, but smeared the voters of North Carolina and a state senator's wife with a quote from a Huffington Post story that was later partly retracted.  Ms. Essig's post was even time-stamped after the HuffPo piece was updated, yet it did not take the new information into account.  Indeed, as of today, her original screed remains posted and uncorrected at Brainstorm.
    It was with anticipation then that I read Ms. Essig's latest post, Count Romney and the Reign of Bain Capital.  While this post is clearly less vitriolic than the earlier one, the scholarship is once again found wanting.  Ms. Essig has no problem with the Obama campaign using the "vampire" metaphor for private equity firms; rather, she seems to feel it doesn't go far enough and that the Obama team could be making more of it:

The Obama campaign’s vampire metaphor is hardly anti-capitalist propaganda. It is, in fact, a fairly accurate description of what happens when neoliberal economic policies lead to almost zero regulation of the market. Bain Capital did in fact bankrupt the company featured in the ad, Kansas City’s GST Steel. According to The Week,

In 2001, shortly after Romney left Bain, GST went bankrupt, 750 employees lost their livelihoods and pensions, and Bain walked away with a $12-million profit.

Alas, what Obama and the Dems are offering is not a larger critique of the no-holds-barred capitalism of the past three decades, but rather a plan to mitigate the effects of rising income inequality with government programs.

    However, if one follows the link to The Week, it turns out The Week is not saying what Ms. Essig implies, that "Bain Capital did in fact bankrupt the company featured in the ad."  They are simply restating what the Obama ad implied.  In fact, immediately after the description of the ad comes this: "Democratic donor and financier Steve Rattner, who oversaw the auto bailout ... called the attack 'unfair,' arguing that it was not Bain's responsibility to create or preserve jobs, but to make profits for its investors."  The passage that contained the quote Ms. Essig cited did more to cast doubt on the claim than it did to confirm it.
    In addition to this distortion, Ms. Essig is trafficking in the classic logical fallacy, post hoc ergo propter hoc:  Bain Capital owned GST Steel.  GST Steel went bankrupt.  Therefore, Bain bankrupted GST Steel.  This amounts to:  I own a dog.  My dog died.  Therefore, I killed my dog.  The assertion is vacuous.
    The real story of Bain and GST Steel is actually quite different from the one Essig and the Obama campaign have spun, as Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal recently pointed out.  The Obama campaign at least provides some further detail they believe backs up their contention, but Ms. Essig cites nothing at all, dealing another blow to Brainstorm's aspirations of "scholarship."
    Although I did not explicitly state this in my May 8th post, I have no desire to see Ms. Essig lose per position at Brainstorm.  I simply would like to see her editor, Liz McMillen, own up to the blatant double standard that prompted her to fire Naomi Riley.  She and the Chronicle certainly have every right to hire whomever they wish to blog on Brainstorm, as well as the right to fire them, even for their ideology (as long as it's in keeping with their contract.)  But as a prominent voice in the ostensibly open-minded community of academia, the Chronicle should at least have the integrity to acknowledge its biases.

The Chronicles of The Chronicle

    I've been following the saga of the Chronicle of High Education versus Naomi Schaefer Riley, a (former) blogger on Brainstorm, the group blog of The Chronicle, most recently in James Taranto's column today.  Riley recently wrote a scathing indictment of graduate level "black studies" programs entitled "The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations."  After a few days of controversy, Riley was fired from the blog when Brainstorm editor Liz McMillen had an epiphany that Riley's piece didn't "conform to the journalistic standards and civil tone" the readers of Brainstorm expected.
    So it is with bated breath that I now await the announcement that the next ex-Brainstorm blogger will be Laurie Essig, who teaches at Middlebury College.  Ms. Essig wrote a blog post on May 7th entitled "Amendment 1, Protecting the ‘Caucasian Race’ and a Whole Lot of Stupid," a critique of the anti-gay marriage amendment up for a vote today, May 8th, in North Carolina.  Based on a single source, a Huffington Post article ("scholarship"), Ms. Essig assails the citizens of North Carolina with rather colorful charges of not only racism, but even throws eugenics into the mix:

Of course, the amendment is not just stupid, but also completely logical, at least within the logics of racial and sexual hygiene that haunts contemporary marriage debates. According to a report in the Huffington Post, the wife of the state senator who wrote the bill, Jodie Brunstetter, said:

 The reason my husband wrote Amendment 1 was because the Caucasian race is diminishing and we need to uh, reproduce.

But eugenics and a highly racialized and classed order have always been the reason that marriage was protected and unmarried people were not considered full citizens in this country. 

Ms. Essig manages to smear not only Jodie Brunstetter and traditional marriage itself, but those who seek to defend marriage (which at this point seems to include about 60% of the voters in North Carolina.)
    Already it seems Ms. Essig lacks the civility and scholarship the Chronicle values so highly, but her journalistic standards may be somewhat lacking as well.  The Huffington Post article to which Ms. Essig refers contains the following update:

Jodie Brunstetter didn't explicitly link North Carolina's marriage amendment with protecting the declining Caucasian race, a woman with knowledge of the conversation now concedes. Freelance writer Kate Maloy told the Winston-Salem Journal that Brunstetter had commented that America was founded by whites, that "the Caucasian race is diminishing," and said that it was important to preserve America as established by its founders. But Brunstetter did not state explicitly that that was why the amendment had been proposed, Maloy said.

The degrees of separation on the original "quote" from the state senator's wife are stunning: Mrs. Brunstetter -> unknown conversant -> "woman with knowledge" of conversation -> freelance writer Kate Maloy -> Winston-Salem Journal -> Huffington Post -> Ms. Essig.  (The law of averages almost requires that Kevin Bacon must be involved somehow.)  But even more remarkable is that the update on the HuffPo story is date/time stamped at 12:05 PM on 5/7/12.  Ms. Essig's post on Brainstorm is 4:16 PM on 5/7/12, more than four hours later that same afternoon.  And yet there's no mention of that  caveat in her posting.
    The ball is in your court, Liz McMillen.  Upon Naomi Riley's firing, you wrote:

One theme many of you have sounded is that you felt betrayed by what we published; that you welcome healthy informed debate, but that in this case, we did not live up to the expectations of the community of readers we serve.
You told us we can do better, and we agree.

So, is the vote in North Carolina about, in the words of Ms. Essig, "moral crusaders [who want] to protect the 'Caucasian' race from the pollution of sex outside of marriage." Is this "better"?