Over on the recommended list, you can see Dr. Jeffrey Feldman talking about his new book, Framing the Debate, and the curious review he got in The New York Times. Curious because it appears that the reviewer, The New Republic's assistant editor Eve Fairbanks, didn't read the book she was assigned to review. Curious because the NYT chose Ms. Fairbanks to be their reviewer at all. For those who aren't familiar with Ms. Fairbanks, she has her own term in the Urban Dictionary, "Fairbanksing":
Her writing style is known as Fairbanksing: A gratuitous fabrication in a story when the truth would have served just fine.... Eve Fairbanks began drawing attention across the internet after her "Mr. Right" article was published in The New Republic. One of the subjects, 'Shooter', objected to a fabricated quote and other details that added nothing to the story. 'Shooter' was never informed that he was on an interview, he thought it was a date and objected to being used in the article.
Fairbanks apparently thinks she has some grounding in the realm of framing, so let's look at one of her own framing efforts, making the "mainstream" Minutemen "defiant" heroes being harrassed by politically correct busy-bodies. Here's another, in which she denies the existence of the right-wing noise machine and its efforts to bring down Bill Clinton. Or one could just consider her journalistic integrity (the term Fairbanksing didn't result from just one mistake) and see what Juan Cole experienced at her hands:
I'm calling out Fairbanks on an issue of journalistic integrity. She contacted me and numerous other academics on the pretext that she was writing a free-lance article on the controversy over Mearsheimer and Walt's paper on the impact of the Israel lobby on American foreign policy. Writing a freelance news article is a different proposition than writing an editorial. She did not say she was writing an editorial. A lot of the persons she contacted might have refused to speak to her if she had admitted that she was writing an opinion piece. Apparently, the way American journalism is practiced nowadays, there are no standards of ethics or accuracy for opinion pieces. Fairbanks misrepresented herself to her subjects.
The point is, given Fairbanks's well-established political biases and past ethical wobbles, her review should be taken with a shaker or two of salt. But judge for yourself. Read the book.
Update: Gina (of Gina Cooper YKos fame) has more. Remind me not to get on her bad side!
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