PPEcel
cope and seethe
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- Oct 1, 2018
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From POLITICO:
The suit, filed by Ruth Shalit Barrett late Friday in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., alleges The Atlantic defamed her in its retraction of an article she wrote on wealthy parents in Connecticut pushing their children into niche sports in a bid to win entrance to Ivy League schools.
In an editor’s note originally appended to the story, published in October 2020, the magazine stated that Barrett had “misled our fact-checkers, lied to our editors, and is accused of inducing at least one source to lie to our fact-checking department.”
You can view a copy of the civil complaint here.
Shalit Barrett's story was about wealthy high school Chads and Stacies in Connecticut whose parents force them to play weird, rich people sports in an attempt to improve their standing in Ivy League admissions.
It’s a layered and probing look at a subculture in Fairfield County, where Barrett resides. The key source — “a buoyant, chatty, stay-at-home mom from Fairfield County, Connecticut” identified by her middle name, Sloane — narrates the mania: “My daughter is 5 foot 11. That’s not the optimum body for squash. She has the frame for rowing. I’ve always had it in the back of my head. Rowing moves the needle way more.”
Normies being normies (I mean, what normie doesn't like reading about Chads and Stacies?), the story blew up. But soon after it was published, Erik Wemple of the Washington Post noted its many inaccuracies.
"In Columbus, Ohio, at the junior-fencing nationals with the couple’s two younger girls and son, he reported that their middle daughter, a 12-year-old saber fencer, had been stabbed in the jugular during her first bout. The wound was right next to the carotid artery, and he was withdrawing her from the tournament and flying home."
Sounds horrible — and improbable. “In my career as an athlete and coach, I’ve never actually seen this happen to anyone,” Byron Neslund, a longtime championship-level fencer, wrote in an email to this blog. “Not to say freak accidents aren’t possible, but in fencing they’re very rare.”
Soon after, The Atlantic retracted the article in its entirety. It turns out that Shalit Barrett's source exaggerated on numerous counts, and that Shalit Barrett told her source to lie to The Atlantic's fact-checking department. From the New York Times' article on the entire fiasco:
In the editor’s 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. “We 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.”
But the real kicker here is that this is not Shalit Barrett's first run-in with ethical lapses. Back in the 1990s, she was fired from the New Republic for plagiarising two articles. In a third article, she claimed that a Washington, D.C. contractor had "served time" for plagiarism -- a flat lie (he later sued the New Republic for defamation and won). In a 1999 interview with the Washington City Paper, Shalit Barrett said:
I was 23 years old, I was writing New Republic pieces, I was writing cover stories for The New York Times Magazine, I was filing columns for GQ, and at the same time, I was bopping around and being a 23-year-old and buying miniskirts with my GQ money. And yes, I loved it, but guess what? One false move and it all came tumbling down.
Oh man, this is so fucking funny.
Look, I'm no conspiracy theorist, but it's writers like these who play fast and loose with the truth who significantly damage public trust in mainstream media institutions, and it's amazing that The Atlantic decided to work with her anyway, knowing that she committed plagiarism earlier in her career.