Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we look at the insane media reaction to Harvard president Claudine Gay’s resignation, question the decision-making that allowed an op-ed about Taylor Swift’s sexuality to run in the New York Times, and cover more media misses.
Media in Denial over Gay’s Plagiarism
“The funniest outcome of the Claudine Gay saga is all of the academics coming out in defense of plagiarism and all of the journalists coming out against journalism,” observed conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who was involved in the effort to oust Gay.
Gay resigned from her role as Harvard president last week amid growing backlash over her oft-criticized testimony before Congress and reports of at least 50 examples of plagiarism in her published works. In one such example, she was accused of copying nearly half a page of material directly from David Cannon’s 1999 book Race Redistricting and Representation: The Unintended Consequences of Black Majority Districts.
The mainstream media has painted the whole fiasco as merely a conservative plot to take down Gay.
Politico centered its report on “the right’s coordinated campaign that helped engineer the departure of the head of the most influential university in the world,” while the Associated Press claimed Gay’s resignation “highlights new conservative weapon against colleges: plagiarism.”
The AP ultimately said the story did not meet its standards and updated its headline to read, “Plagiarism charges downed Harvard’s president. A conservative attack helped to fan the outrage.”
“Harvard President Claudine Gay weathered attacks on her congressional testimony on antisemitism, only to resign after mounting allegations of plagiarism pushed largely by conservatives. In an era of widespread access to plagiarism software and unprecedented distrust of higher education, experts say conservatives could use Gay’s situation as a playbook to attack other leaders in higher education,” the outlet reported.
The story did go on to acknowledge that a Harvard committee “did find multiple shortcomings in Gay’s academic citations.”
The AP also quietly edited a portion of the story about Rufo’s use of the word “scalped”
“Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist who helped orchestrate the effort, celebrated her departure as a win in his campaign against elite institutions of higher education. On X, formerly Twitter, he wrote ‘SCALPED,’ as if Gay was a trophy of violence, invoking a gruesome practice taken up by white colonists who sought to eradicate Native Americans,” the original read. The amended version was updated to explain that the practice was “also used by some tribes against their enemies.”
For all its shortcomings, Ibram X. Kendi responded to the AP report saying, “This is journalism. Getting closer to what truly happened and why. ‘The plagiarism allegations came not from her academic peers but her political foes, led by conservatives who sought to oust Gay and put her career under intense scrutiny in hopes of finding a fatal flaw.’”
Meanwhile, the New York Times said the resignation came after an unsigned complaint was published in the Washington Free Beacon, which the Times said had “led a campaign against Dr. Gay over the past few weeks.”
And The Atlantic declared the “plagiarism war has begun.”
“Claudine Gay was taken down by a politically motivated investigation. Would the same approach work for any academic?” the outlet asked.
CNN reporter Matt Egan offered his own unique take on this situation: “We should note that Claudine Gay has not been accused of stealing anyone’s ideas in any of her writings. She has been accused of sort of more like copying other peoples writings without attribution. So it’s been more sloppy attribution than stealing anyone’s ideas.”
Gay’s defenders quickly made the situation about race.
“Racist mobs won’t stop until they topple all Black people from positions of power and influence who are not reinforcing the structure of racism. What these racist mobs are doing should be obvious to any reporter who cares about truth or justice as opposed to conflicts and clicks,” Kendi wrote in another post.
The Nation‘s justice correspondent, Elie Mystal, said, “All of this is happening because racist white folks had to chew with their mouths closed for two months after George Floyd was murdered and now they’re on their revenge arc.”
“Let’s be real,” 1619 Project author Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote in a post on X. “This is an extension of what happened to me at UNC, and it is a glimpse into the future to come. Academic freedom is under attack. Racial justice programs are under attack. Black women will be made to pay. Our so-called allies too often lack any real courage.”
New York Times editorial board member Mara Gay said the resignation was evidence of an attack on academic freedom, diversity, and multiculturalism. “I don’t have to say that they’re racist, because you can hear and see the racism in the attacks.” (This despite former Stanford and South Carolina presidents, both white men, having been ousted over their own plagiarism.)
CNN analyst Bakari Sellers said, “You can’t help but see the racial animus and the racial overtones in this. You can’t help but see the attack on higher education. And this is even more troubling — you can’t help but see the complicity in mainstream media. When you have institutions like Politico yesterday platforming Christopher Rufo and giving him an interview and giving him a Q&A, that’s not journalism.”
“What we’re seeing is that this is someone — this wasn’t an attack from her peers. This wasn’t an attack from other colleagues who had a problem with her utilizing their words without the proper cites because it doesn’t rise to level of plagiarism, it’s improper citations. This is the right-wing, particularly right-wing conservative males attacking another Black woman in authority and people have to call it out as such,” Sellers added.
Conservative commentator Scott Jennings pushed back, noting conservatives didn’t “go back in time and make up these plagiarism instances.”
“As the leader of one of the most prestigious colleges in the United States, Gay had to be held to a high standard morally and ethically,” Jennings said.
“She had a thin academic record to begin with and when the plagiarism issues popped up, I just don’t see how it was tenable for Harvard to ever say that we won’t hold our president to the same standards that we would hold our students,” he argued.
Sellers then claimed Gay was “overly qualified.”
“She was just as qualified as the 30 people who came before her who just all happened to be White,” Sellers claimed.
Representative Jamaal Bowman (D., N.Y.) insisted the situation was not about plagiarism or antisemitism. Instead, he claimed it was about “racism and intimidation.”
“The only winners are fascists who bullied a brilliant & historic Black woman into resignation. 2024 will be a battle for truth, democracy and our shared humanity,” he said in a post on X.
Al Sharpton called it an “assault on the health, strength and future of diversity, equity and inclusion,” according to Politico.
In a letter announcing her resignation, Gay herself suggested the calls for her ouster were the product of “racial animus.”
“My deep sense of connection to Harvard and its people has made it all the more painful to witness the tensions and divisions that have riven our community in recent months, weakening the bonds of trust and reciprocity that should be our sources of strength and support in times of crisis. Amidst all of this, it has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor—two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am — and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus,” she wrote.
But it’s not all bad for Gay, who will reportedly find work in the university’s political-science department for a salary similar to that of her earnings as president, an estimated $900,000 a year.
Yet it’s hardly alls well that ends well, as the media has now launched its own revenge campaign against those involved in the efforts to oust Gay over her academic failings.
The New Republic revived a February 2023 piece about Rufo’s master’s degree from the Harvard Extension School.
“On paper, conservative activist Christopher Rufo presents his credentials as impeccable: Georgetown University for undergrad and ‘a master’s from Harvard,’” the New Republic wrote in a post on X. “At the very least, that’s a little misleading.”
Rufo refuted the claim saying, “They are free to make the argument that Harvard Extension School is not as prestigious as the other graduate programs — that’s fine. They are also free to make the argument that Harvard Extension School should not grant degrees at all. . . . But the facts are indisputable.”
He cited the HES website, which says, “We are a fully accredited Harvard school. Our degrees and certificates are adorned with the Harvard University insignia. They carry the weight of that lineage. Our graduates walk at University Commencement and become members of the Harvard Alumni Association. As one of 12 degree-granting institutions at Harvard University, we teach to the largest and most eclectic student body.”
He went on to note that the photo accompanying the article is from an event at which he discussed his experience at HES “at length.”
Attorney and journalist Seth Abramson floated the idea that Rufo could be a foreign agent.
“Not saying he is, but if Chris Rufo turned out to be a foreign agent linked to the Kremlin’s allies in Europe it would possibly be the least surprising thing that has happened in the last eight years given that his proudly self-declared scheme to undermine the United States by fomenting racial and ethnic and religious and gender and sexual orientation and sexual identity divisions domestically is the most effective anti-American plot we’ve seen deployed against this country in maybe a generation,” he wrote in a post on X.
After billionaire Harvard alumnus Bill Ackman helped lead the charge against Gay, Business Insider launched its own plagiarism investigation into Ackman’s wife, former tenured Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Neri Oxman.
Reporter Katherine Long shared examples of Oxman allegedly cribbing sentences from Wikipedia.
“I sent these receipts, and dozens more, to @BillAckman earlier today, hopping [sic] they would help him do the research he said he had no time to do before blasting us here,” the reporter wrote.
Ackman disputed this version of events.
“Not only did Ms. Long not contact me. I have never spoken to her in my life. How can she be paraphrasing something I said if she never spoke to me?” He went on to say the outlet reached out to his financial firm, Pershing Square Capital Management, late Friday evening and notified them that the article would be running in two hours.
“Note that they chose to send the email after sundown on Friday night to a family that enjoys Shabbat dinner together,” Ackman wrote on Friday evening. “As a result, we don’t have time to research their claims prior to publication,” Ackman wrote.
The outlet initially claimed to have found examples of plagiarism in four paragraphs of Oxman’s 330-page Ph.D. dissertation from 2010.
“For each of the four paragraphs in question, I properly credited the original source’s author(s) with references at the end of each of the subject paragraphs, and in the detailed bibliography end pages of the dissertation. In these four paragraphs, however, I did not place the subject language in quotation marks, which would be the proper approach for crediting the work. I regret and apologize for these errors,” Oxman said.
One day later, Business Insider claimed to have found more than a dozen other examples of plagiarism in the dissertation that were ripped from Wikipedia.
Headline Fail of the Week
Last week, New York Times editor Anna Marks wrote “Look What We Made Taylor Swift Do,” a 5,000-word piece in the paper’s opinion section suggesting the pop star is secretly queer.
“Whether she is conscious of it or not, Ms. Swift signals to queer people — in our language — that she has some affinity for queer identity,” Marks wrote in the piece.
“I know that discussing the potential of a star’s queerness before a formal declaration of identity feels, to some, too salacious and gossip-fueled to be worthy of discussion,” Marks acknowledged.
“I share many of these reservations,” she wrote. “But the stories that dominate our collective imagination shape what our culture permits artists and their audiences to say and be. Every time an artist signals queerness and that transmission falls on deaf ears, that signal dies. Recognizing the possibility of queerness — while being conscious of the difference between possibility and certainty — keeps that signal alive.”
The editor has authored just two other essays for the outlet — one of which similarly suggested Harry Styles is secretly gay.
Media Misses