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How not to be a sucker² ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ² citations

In this series, I’m proposing heuristics you can use to guess that an author is lying to you. For this post, I’m using chapter 5 of D’Souza’s Illiberal Education, titled “The New Censorship: Racial Incidents at Michigan.” It begins with this anecdote:

“On February 4, 1987, undergraduate Ted Sevransky, hosting his talk show on the University of Michigan radio station WCBN, asked listeners to call up with their favorite racial jokes. Several did. Black students at Michigan were stunned by this open and callous display of racial insensitivity. They protested bitterly to the administration and to the radio station. Sevransky immediately retracted his comments and apologized. ‘The station should not take the responsibility for what I alone did,' he said. He acknowledged ‘bad judgment and poor taste.’ He said if he had contributed to racism on campus, he would do everything he could ‘to fight racism with all the means at his disposal.’ (p. 124) You can check my citations to Illiberal Education here.

The quotes are cited to the campus newspaper, Stephen Gregory, “Ex DJ Apologizes for Racial Slurs,” Michigan Daily, March 4, 1987. (Did you catch it?) and therein lies the trick. D’Souza uses end notes, not footnotes. Even if a reader were inclined to note the citation number and flip to the end of the book to read the citation, would that reader have noticed the article’s date is March 4 (making the apology March 3) and remember that the “prank” happened on February 3? Depending on the exact timing, it was four weeks or a day less from the incident to the apology. This is what D’Souza describes as “immediately.” Immediately! I put the same citation in the sidenote above, something you were more likely to read than an endnote, but I arranged the text to reduce the chance you’d swivel your eyes over to it or, if you did, do more than glance at it. Did I succeed in distracting you from the lie? Let me know at marick@exampler.com or @marick@mstdn.social on Mastodon.

To detect a second lie in D’Souza’s summary, you’d have to read the Michigan Daily article. Fortunately, the newspaper’s archives are online, and include the article in question). The lie? Despite D’Souza’s quotation marks, Mr. Sevransky did not say “he would do everything he could ‘to fight racism with all the means at his disposal’.” He said the university should:

“He regretted that the jokes have exacerbated racism on campus and said he would urge campus leaders to ‘fight racism with all the means at their disposal.’” (Michigan Daily, page 1, lower right in the scanned image)

Credit where due: I didn’t notice the date mismatch, much less check the archives. I found out about it by reading a review of Illiberal Education by Bruce Goldner of the University of Michigan Law School. I expect he stumbled over the “immediately” because he was there for the event. As he remembers it, “more than a month of bitter protests passed before [Sevransky] retracted his racist remarks.“ Goldner, p. 1300 (sic) “More than a month” is a few days off. It looks like nearly 50 years of programming experience have better prepared me to do date arithmetic than a law professor.

Goldner also says:

“Moreover, although D’Souza portrays the disc jockey’s invitation for racial jokes as spontaneous, the DJ actually planned it in advance, and had his friends, not random listeners, call in. Eugene Pak, Racist Jokes Aired Over “U” Radio, Mich. Daily, Feb. 19, 1987, at 1. Such misrepresentations are quite common in this book. For instance, at the beginning of Illiberal Education, D’Souza quotes what he refers to as “a national magazine” to show how overly sensitized our nation has become to issues of race and gender. One finds tucked away in the footnotes at the end of his book, however, that this ‘national magazine’ is the notoriously radical Mother Jones. Pp. 7, 259, n.17” (p. 1300, footnote 31)

The tells

Reading D’Souza, I hypothesize these are his tells:

  1. A vague description of the source, like “national magazine” above, to head off “hey, wait a minute” reactions. Contrast with explicit naming of sources like The New York Times when he wants to provoke a “well, can’t argue with that” reaction.

  2. Links that are to opinion columns. For example, D’Souza has a number of links to The Wall Street Journal. Scandalously, the Journal’s archive only goes back to 1997, so I couldn’t check, but many of the titles cited suggest to me the articles are from the opinion pages. Even in 1991, it was widely remarked that, whereas the Journal’s news pages were exemplary, their opinion pages were much less reliable and tended toward being right-wing rants. “A factual search reveals that the Wall Street Journal has never failed a fact check regarding news reporting; however, IFCN fact checkers Climate Feedback and Health Feedback have found numerous inaccuracies in the WSJ editorial department.” – mediabiasfactcheck.com. I don’t know the credibility of this organization; I can only say that, during my 50ish years as a consumer of news, this seems to be consensus opinion. It certainly squares with my experience as a (very occasional) reader.

  3. A Gish gallop of sentences, each ending with a footnote number. People might check one link, but not twelve.

I wish I had more to give you. I think the “Gish gallop” heuristic is most useful. As Dan Davies says, “Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance.” They probably also don’t need a barrage of truths either, just a few well-selected examples, explored in some detail.

Many sentences, each ending in a citation, is a tell. The author knows that your brain is not very good with numbers, so will slide easily from “X happened 10 times” to “X happens all the time.”

In this chapter, D’Souza generalizes from a double handful of examples to speak of all colleges. As of 2020, there were upwards of 5,000 colleges in the United States, enrolling upwards of 15 million students. If each student does only one stupid thing in a four year undergraduate career, that’s over 10,000 stupidities per day to cite as an example of “what [all] kids these days are doing.“ Hat tip to journalist Michael Hobbes, who makes this point frequently. As a podcaster, he has made something of a career of debunking such generalizations. “The Dumbest Campus Controversies Of The Last Decade” is a good introduction. (It’s a 20-minute teaser episode. I don’t think you can get the full episode without being a Patreon supporter.) His co-podcaster has a full episode on the book The Coddling of the American Mind that has much background. Note that the episodes have extensive links, should you be one of those people who prefers reading to listening.

Sweeping claims like D’Souza’s need statistics (where possible) more than a barrage of anecdotes. A later installment will show what D’Souza does with numbers.