Is this the single weirdest instance of journalistic dishonesty in recorded human history?
You’re going to have to sit down and brace yourself for this one, because it’s super weird. I would like to know how the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) will respond to this piece that I’m writing right now, because this is a crazy story. Brace yourself.
CJR is supposed to be a serious publication. Wikipedia gives this description:
The Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) is a magazine for professional journalists that has been published by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism since 1961. Its contents include news and media industry trends, analysis, professional ethics, and stories behind news.
Chomsky generously gave me permission to publish the correspondence below.
Back in 2013, I asked Noam Chomsky whether he intended to respond to a slander against him that had appeared in the Wall Street Journal:
Pointless. They know exactly what they are doing, and why. Has happened before often. That’s their ideological agenda.
If he’d responded politely to slanders before:
Yes. Stopped trying years ago. Some very strange experiences.
What he meant by “very strange experiences”:
To pick one that’s rather interesting because of the journal involved, one of the standard smears repeating the usual lies and defamations appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review, which prides itself on being the monitor of fairness in the press. I intended to ignore it, as I do almost all of these, but journalist friends asked me to respond, pointing out that the CJR is taken quite seriously among journalists. So wrote a careful, polite, factual response. They published it—almost. They omitted one crucial paragraph and replaced it with a paragraph that they wrote themselves, with no indication, and then published an arrogant and angry response keeping exclusively the paragraph they had introduced. I wrote a polite personal letter to the editor, pointing it out, and asking whether this was appropriate editorial practice. To my surprise, I actually got a response, haughtily stating that it was quite appropriate because the paragraph they had written expressed my position more clearly than my own words did.
As I mentioned, this is interesting because of the journal. Similar stories abound. Usually responses to slanders aren’t published or even acknowledged. Even at the Nation.
I couldn’t believe this CJR story, but Chomsky wrote to me:
No reason to be surprised. It’s pretty common. Interesting in this case primarily because of the pretensions of the journal—which are often much more grotesque than this. I’ve occasionally written about some of their published grotesqueries.
I asked Chomsky for the letter that he wrote to CJR’s editor, and Chomsky sent me this:
Editor,
Just a note of acknowledgment—not for publication of course—of your courtesy in sending me a copy of the July/August issue, in which your version of my letter appears. I was curious to see how you would handle it. Some journals, like the NY Times, simply do not permit response to slanders and lies about those who rank high on their enemy’s list; and it’s of course common, and reasonable, to make minor stylistic changes without consulting the author. But, with considerable experience, I can think of few cases—and none previously in the US—in which editors substantially rewrote a letter, carefully changing its content to suit their preferences, and of course without authorization of the person whose name is then attached.
There is no need to comment on the elimination of the explicit references to the interview/article to which the original was a response, so that the reasons for writing it fade. But I have to admit it was done ingeniously. Just to mention one case, the letter I sent you quotes, and refutes, the crucial charge in your interview/article: that I claimed that “the brutality of the September 11 attacks pales in comparison” with the bombing of al-Shifa. That’s a serious charge. You handled the refutation of it elegantly by deleting my citation of your charge, replacing what you deleted by a sentence that you invented: “The attribution to me of a comparison between the 9/11 atrocities and the U.S. bombing of the al-Shifa plant is false.”
That’s rather neat. In a stroke you eliminated the refutation of your slanderous accusation, which therefore stands unrefuted; and then inserted an entirely new sentence to which you could grandly respond, even with an impressive display of scholarship—after wisely excluding the page references in my letter that directed you to the passage you cite. You are doubtless right that without reference to the original slanders, the response will seem to the reader rather pointless. And you may also be right in assuming that the sentence you invented will mislead readers sufficiently so that they will not discern that the passage to which I specifically directed your attention simply confirms the refutation in my original letter.
It was also a good move to eliminate from my letter reference to the fact that there actually is someone who claims that “the brutality of the September 11 attacks pales in comparison” with the bombing of al-Shifa—namely, the person you are interviewing, who charges his enemy with being “doubly fucked.” Evidently, those facts—and you know that they are correct—would not comport too well with the picture you are seeking to construct.
I won’t run through the rest, clear enough I’m sure to whoever crafted the letter to which you added my name.
Mostly out of curiosity, I do sometimes write letters responding to slanders and deceit that go beyond the ordinary. And some instructive generalizations emerge. Rather generally, journals of the right and the business press are quite honest in allowing response. I’ve never heard of a case where they would resort to practices remotely like yours, no matter how much they detest the person who writes to them. As one moves towards the liberal end of the spectrum, standards often deteriorate, so perhaps it is not surprising that a journal that portrays itself as a courageous watchdog should achieve unique standards of moral cowardice—knowing, of course, that it can get away with anything in the case of properly chosen targets.
I do have a suggestion though. Why wait until you receive a letter from someone who deviates from your standards of political correctness? Why not simply fabricate letters from the start, adding appropriate names as signatures? That would surely be a contribution to the “independent U.S. media”—though, in this connection, I wonder. Do you really not understand the implications of what you wrote in that “Laurels” piece in the same issue? And do you really not expect that US correspondents will be insulted by the implication that they reflexively accepted the shameful US-Israeli propaganda framework, unlike the British media, which of course reached exactly the same conclusions about the Jenin massacre, as you know, but refused to abide by the official propaganda framework, exactly as you would have done, with outrage, had the circumstances been reversed?
Noam Chomsky
In this article that I’m writing right now, I’m not interested in whether Chomsky is correct about “the shameful US-Israeli propaganda framework”, important as that topic may be.
Rather, I’m simply interested in one factual question: Did CJR substantively change Chomsky’s letter and then publish that letter with Chomsky’s name attached to it without asking for Chomsky’s permission to make that substantive change?
If the answer is, “Yes”, then how is that not the single weirdest instance of journalistic dishonesty in recorded human history?
What does CJR have to say for itself on this topic?
I fear your mistake is in assuming this is singular