digamma.net - notes

Atrios can't come home soon enough.

Filling in for him at Eschaton, Leah completely misquotes Eric Alterman:

If you missed Altercation yesterday, Eric has fun, (and so will you) assaulting a NYTimes article on "white studies," which he rightly deems ".the most profoundly content-less article in a major newspaper this year."

Well, as it happens, I DIDN'T miss Altercation on Monday - in fact, I paid a lot more attention to it than Leah did. Here's what Alterman actually wrote (since MSNBC's permalinks are good for nothing:

The front-page editors of The Washington Post discover “whiteness studies” about decade after the field gets going.

Then, two paragraphs down:

But seriously, congrats to Joe Lelyveld and The New York Times for publishing what may be the most profoundly content-less article in a major newspaper this year.

Anyone capable of using a web browser can see that the "content-less" article to which Alterman was referring was completely different from the "whiteness studies" article. Leah also omitted the qualification "may be" from Alterman's accusation.

So, to recap, Leah quotes Alterman as saying something he didn't say about an article he didn't say it about. I emailed the blog 24 hours ago asking them to fix it, and it hasn't been done yet. (Their blog comments are currently broken too.)

Atrios, come home.

Posted by digamma at June 25, 2003 06:15 AM