NBC’s Today took up the Claudine Gay story again on Thursday…not as reporters, but as repeaters. Reporter Erin McLaughlin was a stenographer to deposed power, quoting large passages of Gay’s op-ed in Thursday’s New York Times, titled “What Happened at Harvard Is Bigger Than Me.” It’s the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy!
Hoda Kotb introduced this video press release: “Just one day after she resigned from the top job at the prestigious school, she's speaking out in a New York Times op-ed piece. In it, she suggested that she was the victim of a coordinated campaign to remove her.”
McLaughlin began: “In that letter, Claudine Gay says she's received death threats and called the truth aty amid controversy. And she tried to shed new light on her brief tenure as Harvard president that was plagued with allegations of plagiarism in her work.”
Allegations? The Times itself reported in December that Harvard found shoddy work.
Harvard said it had found two examples of “duplicative language without appropriate attribution.”
Last week, Harvard said that an earlier review had found two published articles that needed additional citations, and that Dr. Gay would request corrections.
This made it more ridiculous that NBC's repeater would just read the line that "I have never misrepresented my research findings, nor have I ever claimed credit for the research of others. And "I proudly stand by my work and its impact on the field."
That's just false: the Free Beacon's last story before she resigned showed how Gay shamelessly stole paragraphs of.text from other scholars.
McLaughlin just presented Gay's lament about white anxiety, that as a black female leader, she makes "an ideal canvas for projecting every anxiety about the generational and demographic changes unfolding on American campuses."
The only opposing soundbite in this piece was a snippet of Rep. Elise Stefanik lecturing Gay that calls on campuses for genocide of the Jews are not acceptable "in context." But NBC loosely quoted Gay saying she "made mistakes," falling into a "well-laid trap."
NBC didn't notice the opinion piece right below Gay's on page A-19, from Times columnist Ross Douthat. The pull quote for that was "The left, not only the right, helped bring down an Ivy League president." NBC couldn't spare any seconds for an opposing view on the entire fracas.
They also didn't note that Times opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury poured cold water on the piece in their Opinion Today newsletter: "As Opinion editor, I rarely express my own views publicly on guest essays we publish, but here it’s worth saying that, in the current conversation around Harvard, I’ve been more drawn to arguments made by others."
Kingsbury concluded with what she thought was Gay's most "resonant" point: “At tense moments, every one of us must be more skeptical than ever of the loudest and most extreme voices in our culture, however well organized or well connected they might be.” Which player in this saga deserved more skepticism here, the conservative journalists or Gay?
