Stefan Sharkansky delivers something of a fisking of John Roemer’s article that recently ran in the San Francisco Daily Journal concerning the Boalt debacle. Roemer attempted to contact me for that article as well. My guess is that this had gotten his attention, possibly as a result of Erin’s link. (Thanks, Erin!) I did attempt to get back to Mr. Roemer, but he never called back, so I assume he was finished with his article by then. Judging from Stefan’s experience and from the excerpts of the article that he posted, it’s probably just as well.

UPDATE: I just received a copy of the article and it appears that I spoke too soon. Roemer did quote a paragraph from my fisking of Professor Krieger’s infamous op-ed piece that ran in the San Francisco Chronicle. I can’t say that I was misquoted – he even got the number of Os right in “soooo” – but I was a little puzzled that he referred to my “sneering” at “demands by the ex-student’s supporters” without acknowledging that the sneer was directed at a specific comment by one specific individual. This is particularly odd since Roemer did refer to the article in question later on in his piece.

As to the traditional media’s policy of printing the names of alleged sex criminals all over the universe while refusing to name their alleged victims, Roemer quotes Jeffrey L. Bleich of Munger, Tolles & Olson as stating that “the nature of such complaints is sensitive and personal … but web sites are not held to journalistic ethical standards.” Silly me, I thought being accused of a sex crime was “sensitive and personal,” too, if anything, more so than being the alleged victim. It’s one thing to withhold a victim’s name if the victim is a child, the suspect has mob connections, or the nature of the crime is such that the victim’s own credibility has little to do with the overall credibility of the charges. That is clearly not the case here. In he-said-she-said cases like this one, it might be ethically defensible for journalists to withhold both parties’ names until the matter was conclusively resolved, so that neither of them ends up being wrongly dragged through the mud, but what on earth kind of “ethical standard” would allow, much less require, a journalist to tell half the story?

Finally, the headline of the story (“Boalt Sex Scandal Takes a Spiteful Turn on the Internet”) was way off the mark. I may have been a little hard on Professor Krieger, but I don’t think anything I wrote on the subject (let alone anything that Stefan or Erin wrote) can reasonably be described as “spiteful.” The byline, which reads “Critics of the woman whose encounter with John Dwyer led to the dean’s resignation say she has an agenda” (emphasis added), was even worse. My piece was directed entirely at Professor Krieger’s op-ed piece, not at Reisch, whom I do not know, nor even at Reisch’s attorney, the insufferable Laura Stevens. Similarly, a brief review of Stefan’s blog revealed no criticism of Reisch personally, only of the media’s eagerness to take her side. Erin’s blog has plenty of criticism of Stevens, and some of Prof. Krieger, but none of Reisch apart from a very general observation (and that based on a reader’s comment) that getting drunk enough to pass out is probably not a very good idea. Thus, the reference to any of us as critics of Reisch seems out of place. I don’t necessarily blame Roemer for this screw-up, as authors of articles are rarely the same individuals who choose the headlines. But whoever did come up with the headline and byline, it certainly does not reflect well on the SF Daily Journal as an institution.

ANOTHER UPDATE. Erin O’Connor is back on line, and has some thoughts of her own on Roemer’s hatchet jobinvestigative work. With three out of three bloggers agreeing that the article was off base, one has to wonder if the real purpose of the article was not so much to get to the bottom of the Reisch/Dwyer debacle as to diss the blogosphere generally. We must be a real thorn in the side of those old school journalists who still see themselves as the final arbiters of which news is or isn’t fit to print.