Salon Lies About a George Will Column, Entire Left Believes Them

As will be readily apparent, this blog has been inactive for years.  However, the long descent of the once semi-respectable and groundbreaking online magazine Salon into yellow journalism and cheap click-bait has been bothering me for a while, and they've hit what I regard as a new low.

Salon writer Katie McDonough penned this column yesterday in response to this column from June 6.  From McDonough's column:

"Washington Post columnist George Will doesn't believe the statistic that one in five women is sexually assaulted while in college. Instead he believes that liberals, feminists and other nefarious forces have conspired to turn being a rape survivor into a "coveted status that confers privileges." As a result of this plot, "victims proliferate," Will wrote in a weekend editorial that ran in the Washington Post and New York Post."

What Will actually wrote:

"Colleges and universities are being educated by Washington and are finding the experience excruciating. They are learning that when they say campus victimizations are ubiquitous ("micro-aggressions," often not discernible to the untutored eye, are everywhere), and that when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate."

After this, Will begins to talk about the campus rape discussion, but McDonough's out of context quoting of Will's column paints a very different picture from what he actually said.  Further, she laments that Will takes issue with the inclusion of "nonconsensual touching" into the definition of sexual assault, making it sound as though Will thinks "nonconsensual touching" is okay, when in fact he was taking issue with it being lumped in with "forcible penetration" as though they are the same thing.  His actual point was that "sexual assault" is a very broad term which can range from forcible rape to an unwelcome pat on the butt.  Neither is okay, but to lump the two together is to cheapen actual forcible rape for the purposes of inflating statistics to make it sound, as Antoine Dodson once said, "They rapin' everybody out here."

McDonough continues, "But what is puzzling — about this editorial and the army of nearly identical pieces of rape apologia that find a way into national newspapers with some regularity — is how much one has to ignore in order to argue these points."  "Current data holds that only 12 percent of assaults on college campuses are reported. It seems like Will believes that hearing from any victims is hearing from too many victims."

But Will doesn't ignore that data.  He mentions it specifically in his column:

"The statistics are: One in five women is sexually assaulted while in college, and only 12 percent of assaults are reported. Simple arithmetic demonstrates that if the 12 percent reporting rate is correct, the 20 percent assault rate is preposterous. Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute notes, for example, that in the four years 2009 to 2012 there were 98 reported sexual assaults at Ohio State. That would be 12 percent of 817 total out of a female student population of approximately 28,000, for a sexual assault rate of approximately 2.9 percent — too high but nowhere near 20 percent."

But McDonough doesn't even attempt to address this point.  Instead, she continues to rail at what she imagined Will said and sets up this straw man, even going so far as to quote The Onion, to rail against "rape apologia".  At no point in the article does she attempt to address what Will actually wrote.  Instead, she cherry-picks a few quotes out of context and makes her article about that.

The worst part is that after this, I later started seeing similar articles popping up on other lefty websites.  It's like nobody actually reads past headlines anymore.  They just get outraged and reflexively parrot something they read on an overtly partisan and hackish website.

An important lesson to learn is that if you read something which seems to perfectly affirm your biases almost to the point of absurdity, it's probably bullshit.  If you only read things which perfectly affirm your biases, you're not only uninformed, you're becoming a lemming.  Reality rarely fits so neatly into our ideological boxes.  It's disconcerting how many people just went along with McDonough's characterization of Will's column rather than actually reading the column for themselves. 

One may reasonably disagree with what Will wrote, and I don't agree with all his conclusions myself (his use of a single college to disprove sexual assault statistics is dubious, at best), but please critique what he actually wrote, not some straw man you invent out of whole cloth.  In this case, McDonough's mischaracterization of Will's column borders on libel.