Identifying The Tree By It’s Fruit
January 8th, 2011 at 11:26 am by BrianFor two years, Victor Navasky operated surreptitiously as the editor of The Columbia Journalism Review before the country’s self-appointed arbiter of journalistic integrity felt obliged to mention that it was being steered by the then current editor of The Nation.
No one, save Hot Earther / Global Warmist scientists, could have predicted so accurately what types of “journalism” students he would be producing:
On Wednesday Village Voice editor Tony Ortega pulled an article from the Voice website after it came out that freelance reporter and recent Columbia grad Rob Sgobbo had fabricated the sources he quoted in the article and lied about his reporting.
Sgobbo is a young education reporter who also worked for the New York Daily News — they fired him today — and graduated from the prestigious (and very expensive) Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 2010. In the past, Sgobbo has written for the Huffington Post, the Norwood News, and the Columbia News Service, among other publications.
The Huffington Post has since deleted his posts from the site. Spokesperson Mario Ruiz tells us: “Our policy is that when a blogger is found to have fabricated a story — either on our site or for another outlet — his or her posts automatically come down. We deleted Rob’s posts today in accordance with that policy.”
His Voice piece “For-Profit Blues“ examined how for-profit “proprietary” colleges were leaving low-income students without degrees and with high debts.
Those nasty “for-profit” colleges as opposed to those sacrosanct state schools that have been producing tomorrow’s leaders today out of the kindness of their taxpayer tenured hearts. Notice which direction Sgobbo’s perfidy leans. Protector of disadvantaged minorities in the class war. Where could this mindset have been incubated?
How dare you racists question the deceptive means of his Stalinist ends?
Central to the piece was a woman named “Tamicka Bourges,” who, according to Sgobbo, told him she had accumulated massive debts while attending Berkeley College, yet never obtained a degree.
In the article [cached version], “Bourges” is described as being “in tears,” and she was “dropping out of Berkeley with no degree and had $25,000 in student loan debt. She didn’t know what to do.”
When Susan Smith claims her kids were dumped in the river by a black man who carjacked her, it’s a hate crime. When Sgobbo claims that “for profit” colleges are taking advantage of black girls it’s just good journalism in the eternal struggle against institutional racism.
Thanks, Victor. Another shock troop in the class war fomenting racial animus makes good because it is so hard to find a student overwhelmed by college debt without making her a black, lesbian cripple who’s a veteran from Bush’s ill-founded wars against brown people.
Navasky is The Tree. And Sgobbo is most assuredly the fruit.
January 8th, 2011 at 11:48 am
I had a conversation two days ago with a woman who until recently believed everything she read in the newspaper. We had taken high school journalism classes together.
When we were younger, we foolishly believed what we were taught about journalistic ethics and just presumed that today’s “reputable” news sources followed these ethics.
She was puzzled that the initial newspaper coverage of our ex-Governator’s cowardly commutation of a politically-connected murderer’s sentence had no reaction from the victim’s families, no coverage of the immediate outrage by local law enforcement or the public in general, and ignored the obvious fact that Ahnold had Fabian Nunez’s cock in his mouth at the time of his pardon.
Ah…but Esteban Nunez was just a good kid in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Mysteriously, readily available facts such as Esteban’s Myspace page depicting him as a “G”, and the fact that he actually stabbed two other victims never made it into print locally.
Hannity is right…journalism is dead.
January 8th, 2011 at 12:01 pm
And it died with Tim Russert. Now we have narrative building mercenaries versed by the Navaskys of the world in all manners of defamation. Nationally and locally.
The only thing worse than people who believe everything they read in newspapers are people who listen to NPR. Talk about a shortcut to thinking.
Whenever I hear, “I was listening to NPR on the drive in this morning….” I know it’s already too late to break out the rubber boots and hip waders.
We will be asked to bailout the newspapers though. Count on it.