A few holdouts are still insisting that Clare Chapman and the Daily Telegraph’s hoax about German prostitution is legit. Some pretty much admit they want the story to be true, while some jerks attacked me personally even for suggesting otherwise. Thus, it behooves me to translate the other article that Chapman cribbed from. Note in particular the date that this story ran: July 30, 2003. Also note that the date in which prostitution became a fully recognized legal profession was January 1, 2002. Then consider the fact that the “25 year old girl” referenced in Chapman’s article is almost certainly the same “25-year-old waitress who turned down a job providing ’sexual services” at a brothel in Berlin” from Berlin referenced in the original article, along with the fact that “just over two years ago” was actually just over three years ago as of the date Chapman’s article ran. Bottom line: Charlotte Allen is right that there’s no evidence Chapman is “the Jayson Blair of Brit journalism.” Such an analogy would be terribly unfair to Jayson Blair. Chapman is Britain’s answer to Mary Mapes, or Dan Rather minus the stature. She’s no Jayson Blair.
So, without further ado, here’s a translation of the Jungle-World article Chapman appears to have cribbed from.
UPDATE: Apparently, some people just don’t know when to stop. After first attacking me for god knows why (is Clare Chapman his sister or something?!), and then deleting my polite responses to his anything but polite tirade (along with any other comments and trackbacks that disagree with him), he now accuses me of lacking “standards” and “intellectual consistency” because … well, just because. Actually, he spells his non-logic out a bit more clearly than that, so let’s have a go. I mean hell, I tried playing nice, but this twit obviously doesn’t understand nice. On to Plan B.
UPDATE: Contrary to the histrionics of a certain self-appointed blogospheric standards arbiter,
Sorry, I didn’t know there was some guy out there whose job it is to apppoint bloggers to arbitrate standards, express opinions, etc. I basically assumed it was a free-for-all. If only I had known such an official authority existed, I would have certainly have turned to the official Appointer of Blogospheric Standards to request an appointment the old fashioned way rather than taking matters into my own hands and appointing myself as a blogger. My bad.
there is absolutely no evidence that this story is a hoax.
Translated: “I like this story, so if you think it’s bunk, well, LA LA LA LA LA! I CAN’T HEAR YOU! LA LA LA LA LA LA.”
It is certainly the case that some media used sensationalist headlines that distorted the fact pattern, but the body of this particular story remain “undebunked.”
In the sense that it’s almost impossible to prove a negative, I suppose so. But between me, Snopes, the German members of ChicagoBoyz, the entire friggin’ media of the one country you’d think would be publishing this scandal on the front page ever day, and the fact that no other journalist in the world has reached the same conclusions Chapman did, not to mention the fact that the Daily Telegraph itself has yet to print either a follow-up or even another article on any topic by (ex-?!) journalist Clare Chapman, I think it’s pretty goddamned safe to conclude that the body of this particular story remains “uncorroborated.”
The perpertrator of the “hoax hoax” has a history of straining to discredit other bloggers for the sake of his (her?) own self-aggrandizement (i.e., “Ha-ha, look at me, I’m smarter than you!”).
Translation: this pissing match has nothing to do with the merits of the prostitution hoax. It’s all about the fact that he thinks I am smarter than he is, and he’s pissed about that. Not pissed that I claim to be smarter - at the time he posted his screed I had made no such claim - but because he thinks/realizes/whatever that I am. Guess what, I’m smarter than most people. It’s no big deal. This is about which story is right, not who can score higher on an I.Q. test.
His/her argument essentially consists of “The Telegraph is a tabloid,” “a name is misspelled in the article” and “‘lefty rags’ have reported it, so it must be false.”
I invite my readers to peruse my past articles to decide for themselves whether my argument was that simplistic or not. Although I will say this: part of it is unambiguously false. For the benefit of the 99% of my readers who probably do not speak or read German (probably including the Kipshit, given his utter lack of familarity with German culture), I’ve translated both of the lefty rag articles described. If he had actually bothered to read either the articles or the translations - assuming, of course, that he can read - he’d know full well that neither of these articles, nor any others that have run to date in any of the German or German-language press, came close to reporting the story that Chapman concocted.
One might also note his (her?) apparent fetish for the word “official” (e.g., “this story is officially bunk”) — since when is ChicagoBoyz an “official” anything? (He/She once insisted that I issue a correction regarding the “official” breed of my own dog!).
So that’s what it’s about. The kipstick knows full well that he doesn’t know a f’n thing about the topic at hand, and was too lazy or too stupid even to read the ChicagoBoyz discussion before commenting on it, but no matter - he’s mad at me for pointing out that he doesn’t know much about dog breeds, either. Note how he whines bout “my own dog,” as if his ownership of a single dog meant a f’n thing about the breed as a breed. Earth to Kip: you own one pit bull / Amstaff; you don’t own the whole breed. If I called my Rottweiler a “ruttwilder” (or worse, a “French Poodle”) you’d have every right to tell me I was wrong, and the fact that it was My. Own. Dog. would not have any bearing on the issue at all. More importantly, all this has what, exactly, to do with the credibility of a story about prostitution and unemployment in Germany that has thus far been alleged by one (count ‘em, one) British journalist and zero (count ‘em, zero) German journalists?
Meanwhile, the Telegraph has not issued a retraction,
Yup, I’m sure the Kipster reads the Telegraph’s correction section every day, so he’d know. He probably gets the paper edition delivered on his doorstep. Lord knows how else he’d even find their corrections if he wanted to.
its competitors have not pounced to disprove it,
Wow, for a Yank, the Kipmeister sure is one prolific reader of British journals. Not only does he have English paperboys fly all the way to deliver the Daily Telegraph to his doorstep every day, he also gets the Independent, the Guardian (a lefty rag which, curiously, has said nary a word about this topic), the Times of London, and scores of other British newspapers you and I have never heard of! All hail the great Kip, and scans each of them every day for articles tending to debunk or corroborate the one article he insists is legit.
the German government has not disputed the incident (the policy implications, yes, but not the incident), neither has the bordello; the woman has not recanted.
What’s to recant? If the kipstick had even bothered to read the story Chapman cribbed her from (or my handy-dandy translation of the same) he’d know there was no real story to recant. The woman was inadvertently referred to a bar tending job at a brothel. She complained, they may or may not have properly apologized to her personally, but they certainly made it clear to her that she was not at risk of losing her job benefits, as Chapman implied and the author of her headline stated explicitly. It might be nice if she were to come forward and admit that yes indeed, she did age a year and a half between July 30, 2003 and January 30, 2005 just like the rest of us, and as such, she was not a 25 year old at the time that Chapman’s cheap knock-off of an article ran. But a correction of such a trivial matter probably wouldn’t run in the Telegraph anyway. But I’m sure Kip already knows that, seeing as he reads the Telegraph and all its major competitors from cover to cover every day, paying special attention to corrections.
He/she…
That shows how deep the French Kip digs to get at the bottom of a story. The last person thick enough to get my sex wrong was Mark York, hardly someone I’d want to be lumped together with. [OK, so "Sunshine" made a similar error much more recently than that. That's different; her error was clearly intentional.]
also posts the following –
All further blogger speculation on this subject should end immediately.
What a very blogospheric response — “rush to (counter-)judgment; don’t dig any deeper. Just shut up — because I say so.”
Translation: an appeal to stop blindly speculating on something you know next to nothing about equals a directive not to research the matter and actually learn something. How sad.
How sad.
Exactly.
(UPDATE: Meanwhile, weeks later, he/she/it is still blogging about it. So much for “standards” and “intellectual consistency.” Go figure.)
Apparently, in this guy’s kipped up world, everyone has a duty to remain consistent not only to what one says, but to what some idiot from New York (but I repeat myself) says you meant. O-kay.
