In what seemed like damage control after President Donald Trump threatened to defund schools teaching its 1619 Project, the New York Times has dropped its claim that US history began with slavery, triggering an immense backlash.
After the chief author of the 1619 Project attempted on Friday to quietly reverse course on the project’s claim that 1619 – the year the first African slaves arrived on American shores – was the nation’s “true” founding – and critics revealed the paper itself had quietly changed its own text – all hell broke loose. Even a former Times colleague of the project’s head ripping the paper’s lapse in “journalistic ethics” on Sunday, triggering further backlash to the backlash.
Basic rule in online journalism: if you change something after publication, acknowledge and explain it. On 1619 Project, NYT just broke this basic *ethical* rule. And to further the cover up @nhannahjones deleted all tweet history. Let that sink in.
Over the weekend, the 1619 Project’s critics painted a damning picture of the erstwhile ‘Paper of Record’ muscling the project’s central claim into an Orwellian memory-hole – only to be themselves accused of racism and even stalking.
Your obsession with 1619 project is unhealthy and comes from a very dark place. With every tweet, statement, interview, and article, you confirm that your critics were right about you.
— James Lindsay, not some effing sage (@ConceptualJames) September 21, 2020
Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones was accused of gaslighting by members of the political Right and Left alike on Friday as she denied the project’s aims had ever been to claim the US was literally founded to protect and prolong the institution of slavery. Even after one journalist targeted by her alleged misrepresentation dug up a snapshot from the Wayback Machine showing the New York Times itself had cited “1619 as our true founding,” she dismissed it as “ancillary digital intro” – whatever that means.
— James Lindsay, not some effing sage (@ConceptualJames) September 21, 2020
Here she is calling Ben Shapiro a liar and saying that the wrongheadedness of his claim is easily verified. Am I going crazy? I thought. So I went back to check myself to make sure I didn't error in my essay. What I found is quite damning. pic.twitter.com/43FatPnJFc
While Hannah-Jones won a Pulitzer for being the “staff writer…from whose mind [the 1619 Project] sprang,” she has retroactively attempted to soft-pedal her stated convictions that the US was “founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy” in an apparent effort to salvage the credibility of her employer. Her Twitter feed, she stated on Monday in the course of a vow to “spend a lot less time on here,” was “not official 1619 Project copy.” She repeatedly argued the Times had never actually claimed the US was founded in August 1619.
Apparently, this needs to be said: My Twitter timeline is not official 1619 Project copy. The #1619project is written by an awe-inspiring group of journalists, historians and poets. Those interested in what it actually says can read original text in full: https://t.co/3MtzpJzGZe
This is the last thing I will say about this. The wording in question never appeared in the 1619 Project text. It appears nowhere in the printed copy, something easily verifiable as pointed out to you. It didn't appear in my essay nor any of the actual journalism we produced. https://t.co/O3GmV8cc9W
But even the link Hannah-Jones shared in her sign-off retort to critics confirmed their claims, affirming Times had labeled the 1619 arrival of the first African slaves as “the moment [America] began” and “the country’s true birth date, the moment that its defining contradictions first came into the world, was in late August of 1619.” Her own tweets contradict her.
Hannah-Jones’ detractors helpfully supplied a plethora of other links containing the original text – and pointed out that until very recently, all criticism had been blamed on misrepresentation by nebulous right-wing evildoers.
Nikole Hannah Jones repeats this claim on CNN, where the interviewer credulously accepts her framing that the right is misrepresenting the project https://t.co/drU0CTZELS
Just weeks after Trump threatened to strip federal funding from any school teaching the Pulitzer Prize-winning series earlier this month, the Times edited the 1619 Project’s intro text on its webpage to soften its historical revisionism. Critics demanded an explanation – which has not been forthcoming – and some even compared the lapse in "ethics in journalism" to GamerGate.
Possibly relevant: the NYT has been criticized over this specific line for months, and NHJ did not take it well when it happened. The Times needs to explain when and why they dropped it. pic.twitter.com/RE9b6kwcOC
Journalists demanding ethics in journalism in #1619gate get nasty attacks. This is exactly what happened in GamerGate too. The Woke manipulators don't like getting caught out in their lies, employ DARVO aggressively. pic.twitter.com/qp3lblQTOq
— James Lindsay, not some effing sage (@ConceptualJames) September 21, 2020
Meanwhile, Trump has called for a “1776 Commission” to teach “patriotic” American history, triggering further seething from Hannah-Jones and her colleagues.
The 1619 Project has been controversial since day one, its publication eliciting condemnation by historians who pointed out its missteps on “matters of verifiable fact” and seeming prioritization of ideology over reality. Even historians who celebrated the project’s efforts to shine a light on the role played by slavery in early American history criticized the 1619 Project for playing fast and loose with the truth, all while the Times allegedly ignored corrections submitted by sympathetic fact-checkers.
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