Tag: New York Times

NYT Interview with Michael Rose

The New York Times’ Claudia Dreifus recently interviewed longevity researcher Michael Rose. In the 1970s Rose managed to extend the average lifespan of fruit flies by forcing them to breed at relatively old ages, thereby providing a selection event for longer life (since only older fruit flies would be able to reproduce in this experiment).

In response to a question from Dreifus, Rose explains why longevity research should embrace an evolutionary biology perspective,

Because the common assumption is that young bodies work and then they fall apart during aging. Young bodies only work because natural selection makes them healthy enough to survive and breed.

As adults get older, natural selection stops caring about them, so we lose its benefits and our health. If you don’t understand this, aging research is an unending riddle that goes around in circles.

The problem, of course, is that fruit flies live very short lives, and extending lifespan this way with other animals is not quite so easy (Rose notes that the increasing age at which women give birth in the West could eventually have the same effect, but that it would take centuries to see any significant effect).

Because of his evolutionary perspective on longevity, it was not surprising to read that Rose believes there is no high end limit on how far human longevity can be extended, but I was surprised to see that Rose expects significant life extension technologies in a relatively short time period,

There’s not going to be one magic bullet where you take one pill or manipulate one gene and get to live to 500. But you could take a first step, and then another so that in 50 years’ time, people take 50 or 60 pills and they live to be 200.

Leaving aside F.D.A. approval, it looks like we are about 5 to 10 years away from therapies that would add years to our present life span. For now, pharmaceuticals will be the primary anti-aging therapy.

After another 10 years or so, the implantation of cultured tissues will become common — especially skin and connective tissues. Reconstructive surgery is certain to become more effective than it is today.

Eventually, we will be able to culture replacement organs from our own cells and repair damage using nanotech machines. All of this will increase life span.

I’d also like the “play cornerback like Deion Sanders” nanomachines, but that’s just me.

Source:

Live Longer With Evolution? Evidence May Lie in Fruit Flies. Claudia Dreifus, New York times, December 6, 2005.

Does the NYT Have Another Jayson Blair On Its Hands?

On Friday, the Boston Globe fired one of its freelance writers, Barbara Stewart, after it was discovered that Stewart fabricated large parts of a story she wrote about the Canadian seal hunt.

In her article, Stewart described Tuesday’s hunt in vivid detail, describing how hundreds of Canadian hunters in boats shooting seals until the waters in the area turned blood red.

The only problem is the hunt never happened — the weather was too bad on Tuesday, so the hunt didn’t get underway until Friday. Stewart apparently called an official to confirm when the hunt would actually begin and then just used her imagination to fill in the details.

The Globe, of course, is owned by the New York Times. It turns out that before turning to freelancing, Stewart was a reporter at the New York Times for 10 years.

Jayson Bair, Round II?

Source:


Globe suffering tough Times: Fabricating freelancer came from N.Y. paper. Brett Arends and Jay Fitzgerald, The Boston Herald, April 16, 2005.

Paper apologizes for fake seal hunt story. Reuters, April 15, 2005.

Wikipedia Far More Accurate than Instapundit/Dinocrat (And That’s Not Saying Much)

For some reason, Instapundit is linking to someone who is flat out falsely charging the New York Times with plagarism. According to blogger Dinocrat (Jack Risko),

The New York Times copied an erroneous Wikipedia entry into its news pages today. From the NYT’s article on the Marburg Haemorragic Fever outbreak in Angola:

There is no cure or vaccine for the highly contagious virus. Victims suffer a high fever, diarrhea, vomiting and severe bleeding from bodily orifices and usually die within a week.

The Wikipedia entry on the virus:

There is no cure or vaccine for the highly contagious virus. Victims suffer a high fever, diarrhea, vomiting and severe bleeding from bodily orifices and usually die within a week.

Wikipedia mischaracterizes how contagious Marburg is, and the NYT copies the mistake. Consulting more authoritative sources would have avoided the problem. From the CDC:

This is a lie. Dinocrat apparently doesn’t have the first clue about using Wikipedia, and Glenn Reynolds is content just to take his word for it. The reality is that Wikipedia plagiarized from the New York Times story, not the other way around.

This is trivial to demonstrate. Here is the Wikipedia page on Marburg on April 8, 2005. It doesn’t include the two-sentences that Dinocrat claims the NYT copied from Wikipedia. Those two sentences were added later on April 9, after the New York Times story was published. Here is the page where the edit is made, listed at 15:28 (I have no idea what time zone Wikipedia is using).

The history page for the Marburg virus entry at Wikipedia also confirms that Wikipedia copied from NYT. There’s a notation made later in the day (after Dinocrat had made his post) at 23:31,

nyt link – phrase was copied from there, sorry for wrong summary

So the same text appeared at both Wikipedia and the New York Times. Rather than check the history at Wikipedia — where, after all, articles are being constantly updated and edited — Dinocrat chose to simply assume the NYT was copying from Wikipedia and then Glenn Reynolds ran with that ball, spreading the meme among those who read his popular blog.

Sometimes its not just the MSM who come off as rank amateurs who are more interested in playing “gotcha” than taking the time to get their facts straight. If you’re going to write stuff like . . .

We knew there was a problem with the NYT story right away, and it took only a few clicks to determine that the lazy use of Wikipedia was the source.

. . . you better make sure you’re not a lazy-ass yourself.

Reynolds isn’t much better. He warns that,

IT’S USUALLY A MISTAKE to copy things from Wikipedia without looking further into the subject.

So, its a mistake to take Wikipedia at face value, but any old blogger who makes a very serious charge with basically no evidence as to who was plagiarizing from who apparently can be trusted “without looking further into the subject.” Bah, nobody apparently gives a damn anymore. If it slams James Watt, Bill Moyers has no problem repeating a bogus quote from an online source without investigating further. If it slams the NYT, Reynolds has no problem spreading false accusations of plagiarism around the Internet (and I thought Glenn was supposed to be the voice of reason about accusations of plagiarism.

Oh, and one other point. Dinocrat is full of crap on the claim that Marburg is not highly contagious simply because it “require[s] direct contact with the bodily fluids or excreta of an infected person, so they are pretty easy to avoid.” First, since the virus can live on surfaces of objects for several days, according to the CDC, it might not be so easy to avoid contact with infected fluids. Second, just because you can, in theory, easily avoid exposure to an infectious agent doesn’t mean that it isn’t highly contagious.

Hepatitis A, for example, is also considered highly contagious, and it is usually contracted by consuming the fecal matter of someone who is already infected (it can also be contracted through sexual activity and IV drug use). I suspect most people would agree that this is something that should be, in theory, pretty easy to avoid. Like Marburg, however, Hepatitis A is generally considered highly contagious because of the very high risk of contracting the disease once a person comes into contact with the infectious agent. Contagion is not just the odds of being exposed to an infectious agent, but also about how likely that infectious agent is likely to cause the disease once exposure does occur.

Marburg and its deadlier cousin Ebola are considered highly contagious because exposure to the infectious agent is believed to produce a very high risk of infection. The only certain way to prevent the disease from spreading is isolating patients and having those who come into contact with patients, such as health care workers, use preventative measures such as face shields, etc., to prevent have any contact with the bodily fluids of those afflicted.

Risko should probably revise his title to say something like, “Note to Rest of the World: Don’t Use This Blog As An Authoritative Source.”

I Wish the Terrorists Were Christians (AKA F— The New York Times)

If you’re a believer don’t take this the wrong way, but some days I wish Osama bin Laden and other terrorists currently plaguing the world were Christian rather than Muslim. If it were Christians who had planned 9/11 or Christians who were beheading people in Iraq or Christians who murdered filmmakers for pointing out the absurdities in their religion, then the Leftists and the liberal media would have no problem whatsoever dwelling on the evil Christian terrorists. If they were Christians, you’d see the terrorists referred to as evil fanatics rather than as resistance fighters. If the terrorists were Christians, you’d see calls for all-out crackdowns on them instead of calls for more cultural sensitivity.

Don’t believe me? Lets just look at that piece-of-s— rag The New York Times. This week, Muslim fanatics in the Netherlands murdered filmmaker Theo Van Gogh because Van Gogh had dared make a provocative film criticizing the Koran’s and Muslims’ treatment of women. These terrorists first shot Van Gogh then cut his throat with a butcher’s knife and left a pro-Muslim, anti-Semitic five page rant pinned to his body.

Because the killers were Muslim, the New York Times view is that this is simply at best some sort of cultural misunderstanding that is the result of the Dutch government’s failure to better manage the large influx of Muslim immigrants there.

Urgent efforts are needed to better manage the cultural tensions perilously close to the surface of Dutch public life. The problem is not Muslim immigration, but a failure to plan for a smoother transition to a more diverse society. One very real danger is that the public trauma over the van Gogh murder may lead to a clamor for anti-Muslim policies that could victimize thousands of innocent refugees and immigrants.

The challenge for Dutch political leaders is to find ways to reverse this disturbing trend of politically motivated violence without making it harder to achieve cultural harmony.

A crackdown on Muslim extremists would just be wrong because it might end up affect non-extremist Muslims as well. Instead, the New York Times seems to think that what the Netherlands needs is some sort of national sensitivity training to “achieve cultural harmony.”

Now what about my thesis — what if Van Gogh’s murderers had been Christians? Thankfully the New York Times provided that answer in 1998, after the equally despicable murder of abortion provider Dr. Barnett A. Slepian by an anti-abortion terrorist.

Here’s what the New York Times had to say about how the U.S. should react to Slepian’s murder (emphasis added),

But a principled commitment to provide a constitutionally protected service could not stop the assassin’s bullet that tore through his kitchen window and into his back Friday night. His death shows again how tentative the right to abortion has become in the face of terrorism by anti-choice fanatics. Their repeated acts of terrorism must be met with the severest possible crackdown by law-enforcement authorities. If an armed police officer has to be stationed outside every abortion provider’s home and office, 24 hours a day, let it be done. This is an assault not only on individual doctors, but also on the rights and liberties of all Americans.

. . .

It is bad enough that conservatives in Congress and in state legislatures are working to dismantle reproductive rights by banning certain procedures, such as so-called partial birth abortion, and by requiring waiting periods and parental consent before an abortion can be obtained. But those restrictions are at least imposed by the normal give and take of political and judicial struggle in a democracy. What is outrageous is the attempt to shut down abortions by illegal means — by shooting the doctors or bombing the clinics or harassing the women seeking to exercise their constitutional right. Some anti-abortion groups, to their credit, have denounced the bombings and shootings, but others seem reluctant to issue the strong condemnations that are warranted. Indeed, one particularly virulent anti-abortion Web site lists the names of doctors it says perform abortions, or “crimes against humanity,” with a code indicating whether they are “working,” “wounded” or a “fatality.” Such incendiary rhetoric, and frequent accusations by some anti-abortionists that abortion providers are committing murder, can only fuel more terrorism.

The increase in anti-choice laws and ongoing campaigns of harassment by protest groups, even short of murder, have worked to make abortions harder to obtain. More than 80 percent of counties in this country have no abortion provider. In 45 states, the number of doctors who performed abortions declined between 1982 and 1992. Dr. Slepian was among those who took a stand against restricting reproductive freedom and paid with his life. Unless these brave doctors are better protected, fewer doctors in the next generation will be willing to place themselves and their families in such danger. That is what the terrorists want. They must not be allowed to succeed.

So when an anti-abortion terrorist murders a doctor, the New York Times had no problem calling for “the severest possible crackdown” and had no qualms about linking the activities of the mainstream anti-abortion movement with terrorists who murdered Slepian.

But when Muslim extremists brutally murder a filmmaker, The New York Times says any legal crackdown would be a mistake and appears to call for some sort of nationwide cultural senstivity training to achieve more cultural harmony and transitions to a diverse society.

Too bad Van Gogh wasn’t murdered by pro-life Christians — then the New York Times might have actually taken his murder seriously.

Sources:

Violence Against Abortion Doctors. Editorial, New York Times, October 26, 1998.

Deadly Hatreds in the Netherlands. Editorial, New York Times, November 5, 2004.

The Media Lied and People Died?

Among the smaller tidbits in the 9/11 Commission’s report are a couple of shots the commission takes at the media in general and at the New York Times in particular for downplaying terrorism and Osama Bin Laden as a threat prior to 9/11. At one point, for example, the report notes,

It is hard now to recapture the conventional wisdom before 9/11. For example, a New York Times article in April 1999 sought to debunk claims that Bin Laden was a terrorist leader, with the headline ‘U.S. Hard Put to Find Proof Bin Laden Directed Attacks.'”

I was curious, so I looked up that story on Lexis/Nexis. It includes paragraphs like this,

In their war against Mr. bin Laden, American officials portray him as the world’s most dangerous terrorist. But reporters for The New York Times and the PBS program “Frontline,” working in cooperation, have found him to be less a commander of terrorists than an inspiration for them.

Enemies and supporters, from members of the Saudi opposition to present and former American intelligence officials, say he may not be as globally powerful as some American officials have asserted. But his message and aims have more resonance among Muslims around the world than has been understood here.

The 9/11 report also includes a quote from an unidentified Saudi Arabian individual who complains that the American media’s anti-Saudi(!?) bias fuels terrorist groups like Al Qaeada. But the 1999 New York Times story shows exactly the sort of cavalier attitude that the Saudi took (and continue to take IMO) toward Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden,

On May 31, 1996, four Saudis were beheaded after confessing to bombing a Saudi National Guard post in Riyadh and killing five Americans. All told their interrogators that they had received Mr. bin Laden’s communiques. Only 25 days later, a truck bomb tore through a military post in Dhahran, killing 19 American soldiers.

Mr. bin Laden was blamed by American officials for instigating the attacks. But no known evidence implicates him, and the Saudi Interior Minister, Prince Nayef ibn Abdel Aziz, has absolved him. “Maybe there are people who adopt his ideas,” Prince Nayef said. “He does not constitute any security problem to us.”

The interesting thing in light of what the report says about Sandy Berger — that he rejected no less than four separate attempts to grab Bin Laden based on narrow legalistic grounds — is that the Times story is also focused on excessively legalistic matters. After all, the only thing the United States could prove with absolute certainty was that Bin Laden had fled to Sudan and then Afghanistan, declared war on the United States, was busy training terrorists in camps, and regularly issued calls for terrorists to strike against American targets as well as praised successful such strikes.

Pretty weak case, huh?

Source:

U.S. Hard Put to Find Proof Bin Laden Directed Attacks. Tim Weiner, New York Times, April 13, 1999.

Putting Words in Mel Gibson’s Mouth at the New York Times

Jim Davila uncovers an atrocious misquoting of Mel Gibson by the New York Times. Apparently the only thing they’ve learned from the Jayson Blair scandal is that they should lie by selective quoting rather than by outright making things up.

This is a quote from Gibson about his movie, Passion, that was widely republished and makes Gibson come across as a blatant anti-Semite. This is how Frank Rich characterized Gibson’s comments,

Asked by Bill O’Reilly in January if his movie might upset “any Jewish people,” Mr. Gibson responded: “It may. It’s not meant to. I think it’s meant to just tell the truth. . . . Anybody who transgresses has to look at their own part or look at their own culpability.

As Davila notes, the clear implication there is that Gibson is an anti-Semite who thinks the Jews are collectively culpable for the death of Jesus. When I first read that quote a few days ago, I thought it was revolting and couldn’t believe Gibson would say something so blatantly anti-Semitic.

But Davila unearthed the transcript of the O’Reilly interview. Here’s what Rich left out of the ellipses,

O’REILLY: Is it [Passion] going to upset any Jewish people?

GIBSON: It may. It’s not meant to.

I think it’s meant to just tell the truth. I want to be as truthful as possible. But, when you look at the reasons behind why Christ came, why he was crucified, he died for all mankind and he suffered for all mankind, so that, really, anybody who transgresses has to look at their own part or look at their own culpability.

As Davila notes, Gibson is not saying that the Jews have some special collective responsibility for Jesus’ death, but rather that Jesus’ death is the fault of everyone who sins (which in itself is a bizarre idea, but not an anti-Semitic one).

Not only does this sort of distortion violate what few ethical principles are left in journalism, but it also could/will backfire. I think there are plenty of good reasons to be concerned that Gibson and his movie might be anti-Semitic. Making quotes up like this, however, will simply further turn the debate away from the facts of the movie and Gibson’s beliefs and on to a debate about how the largely secular media filters and presents religious ideas and views.