Remember That Podcast You Liked So Much?

Good cautionary example of the same phenomenon in print.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/12/15/new-yorker-editors-note-japan-family-romance/

An award-winning 2018 New Yorker story now has a whopper of an editor’s note atop it. In “A Theory of Relativity," published in April 2018, staff writer Elif Batuman profiled a Japanese company called Family Romance, which supplies actors who sub in for missing family members. Need to convince your parents that you have a girlfriend? Need to convince your girlfriend that you have parents? Family Romance can help. The story won a National Magazine Award for feature writing from the American Society of Magazine Editors in March 2019. And on Sunday night, it collapsed.


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In short, the New Yorker found that the people who provided most of the narrative juice in the story — Ishii, Nishida and Shimada — were unreliable.

 

“We remain confident about the value of ‘A Theory of Relativity’ as an exploration of ideas of family in Japan and more widely.”

My friends, I agree that fiction has “value.”

But it must be marked as fiction!

 

Both pieces raise a lot of questions.

Not the least of those being, can you retract part of an article?

Clearly the Times and the New Yorker hope so.

 

The ‘Caliphate’ retraction won’t end the New York Times’s woes

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...ate-retraction-wont-end-new-york-timess-woes/


Particularly outspoken was C.J. Chivers, a former foreign correspondent and now a staff writer for the New York Times Magazine. Chivers was among the first Times reporters to channel his worries to editors at the paper. For his presentation at the Thursday meeting, Chivers spoke from prepared remarks. He said: “Warnings were not just dead letters. They became a basis to impugn people personally and professionally.”

His audience included Baquet, managing editor Joe Kahn and assistant managing editor for international Michael Slackman. Other attendees included current and former Middle East correspondents and several reporters from the paper’s Washington bureau, who had collaborated frequently with Callimachi on terrorism stories.

Based on the interviews of the Erik Wemple Blog, Chivers was speaking for several of his colleagues when he said, “You discouraged people from using the fire alarm, and when some of us did use the fire alarm anyhow, we found the alarm was not connected to anything.” Chivers sounded more hurt than angry, said one attendee. He told the group that the experiences of the Middle East correspondents over the past five years have been “like losing faith in a church.”

 

He gone:



New York Times journalist who worked on 'Caliphate' podcast quits | Daily Mail Online