
Naomi Wolf’s Book Premise Corrected by Host in BBC Interview - Anon84
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/naomi-wolfs-book-corrected-by-host-in-bbc-interview.html?__twitter_impression=true
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hanoz
Ouch. Having just listened to the audio, and not knowing anything about either
party, or the subject matter, I have to say the author took it quite
graciously, but I think she was very lucky to have it broken to her by so
gentle an interviewer.

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jMyles
Wolf is a solid author and researcher; her reaction to this absolute nightmare
(being called out love on NPR for misunderstanding a British legal term from
the 1820s on which her research into 15 cases is based) shows incredible
poise.

Sucks that she got it wrong, but I've been similar gaffes before and certainly
bnot reacted as professionally.

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gnusty_gnurc
She's not a solid author though, it seems.

[https://www.vox.com/2014/10/5/6909837/naomi-wolf-isis-
ebola-...](https://www.vox.com/2014/10/5/6909837/naomi-wolf-isis-ebola-
scotland-conspiracy-theories)

~~~
jMyles
Reading that article, do you think that her quotes are used fairly in each
case? The article repeatedly tries to read between the lines, accusing Wolf of
"implying" a number of outrageous fact patterns, but I'm not sure that her
posts actually imply any such things.

She states that SITE received a US government grant (true), that similar US
government grants have been used to fund disinformation (almost certainly
true), that the New York Times relied on a single primary source instead of
sending an investigative journalist to do on-the-ground investigation (true as
far as I know, but feel free to correct me if I've got it wrong here), that
the US has history of militarizing Africa and empowering African dictatorships
(true).

She also points out that, given the quality of the videos, if they _were_ fake
(which she doesn't not assert or even imply to my eyes), then the work can
have been done by just 4 people. And thus, the responsible act for a serious
news gathering outfit is to confirm the authenticity of the video instead of
assuming it is real on the US government's say-so alone. I hope we all agree
on this. It's not like these videos are cryptographically signed by a known
keypair belonging to ISIS. Real journalism means doing the hard work of
confirming the provenance of pieces of media - even if doing so might require
hypothesizing that a piece of media is fake and working to disprove that
hypothesis.

Finally, she points out that calling any organization "evil" in passing, in an
otherwise dispassionate news article, is not in keeping with the traditional
editorial style of the New York Times. This is also true as far as I know,
unless there is a standard for "evil" defined in unpublished style guide.

So for Vox (or anyone else) to jump all over the road about what she implied
by pointing out these truths is not particularly relevant.

I also can't help but notice that these kinds of smear pieces against her
started just as she began to embrace some of the more effective and sane
libertarian movements in the US (eg, her high-profile appearance at New
Hampshire Liberty Forum). I assert that much of corporate media (and the
ecosystem that relies on it) is unable to properly contextualize figures who
cross political lines and form alliances that don't fit neatly into a right-
left narrative, and that this often takes the form of painting these figures
as extreme or unhinged.

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TheMagicHorsey
That was an unnecessary amount of cringe to bear for a Friday afternoon. I
could have done without that. This is the real life version of the kind of
dream where you catch yourself giving a lecture naked.

Having said that, I think the author did the right thing. She accepted that
the premise of her book was wrong, and she promised to correct it. That's more
than most people do when caught out live like that.

~~~
theoh
She didn't accept that the premise was wrong, just that this particular detail
was inaccurate:

"Wolf said she appreciated Sweet’s “important correction”, but rejected the
idea that it challenged the main thrust of her book. “Outrages doesn’t purport
to be a comprehensive database of eventual sentences served for sodomy,” she
explained. “Its focus is on the reception of news about laws and sentences by
a group of friends, as well as eventual arrests of friends of Symonds.”

[https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/books/2019/...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/24/naomi-
wolf-admits-blunder-over-victorians-and-sodomy-executions)

~~~
TheMagicHorsey
I guess I will have to gracefully admit I was wrong in saying that she
gracefully admitted that she was wrong.

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chrisdhoover
Somewhere Nelson is letting out a hardy ha ha

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DoreenMichele
The book is titled _Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of
Love_. Apparently, part of what it covers is cases where the author thought
people were put to death when they were actually pardoned:

 _during the interview, broadcaster Matthew Sweet read to Wolf the definition
of “death recorded,” a 19th-century English legal term. “Death recorded” means
that a convict was pardoned for his crimes rather than given the death
sentence.

Wolf thought the term meant execution._

I am, sadly, unsurprised.

The title plus gender of the author paints a picture for me of one (or both)
of the following scenarios:

1\. Angry feminist type not adequately fact checking because it fit some
outrage fuel narrative she had in mind. "Heads will roll. Don't confuse me
with the facts."

2\. I honestly think women tend to not get adequate constructive feedback at
early critical junctures.

I think the second issue was a factor in the Theranos debacle. It's an issue
that makes me quite crazy at times as someone who happens to be female and has
had trouble getting traction.

