Isaac Chotiner's Alan Dershowitz Q&A is the blueprint for "cancel culture" coverage
If such coverage must exist, it's time to go beyond the single-source story newspapers seem to have adopted as their preferred format when covering the topic.
There’s a joke among people who are really plugged into media Twitter: if Isaac Chotiner calls to ask if he can interview you, run.
On Tuesday, the New Yorker Q&A writer released an interview with Trump lawyer Alan Dershowitz, and in the process, he demonstrated why that remains solid advice.
Some background: For years, Dershowitz has complained about being “shunned” and “canceled” because of his advocacy on Donald Trump’s behalf. That advocacy includes his preposterous defense of Trump during the then-president’s first impeachment trial in 2020, in which he said that “if a president does something he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.” (Reminder that Trump was impeached for the first time for trying to rig the 2020 election in his favor ahead of time; Trump was impeached the second time after trying to overturn the 2020 election after he lost.)
Dershowitz, you may recall, is one of the lawyers who helped negotiate a “non-prosecution agreement” for Jeffrey Epstein in response to claims that Epstein had sexually abused underage girls.
Last week, Dershowitz tweeted “Excerpts from a letter to me,” in which he relayed a message that he claims to have received from a man who was reading one of Dershowitz’s books at the beach when a group of men he was playing beach volleyball with “slugged and punched” him in the face.
Dershowitz later posted the letter to his Substack. I suppose, in theory, that it’s possible that this actually happened, but… come on. This did not happen.
For years, coverage of Dershowitz’s whining has missed the mark in one way or another.
Personally, I think the world could do without any more profiles about people who were “canceled” (not invited to a dinner party) because of his “unpopular, principled” positions (such as his belief that the age of consent is too high, apparently.)
I, for one, do not care if Dershowitz gets invited to a dinner party. In fact, just seeing the words “dinner” and “party” make my eyes glaze over with boredom. The fact that there seem to be a bunch of people working in media who think that Dershowitz’s story (or that of about 95% of all “cancel culture” stories) is somehow crucial knowledge for to this moment in history, worthy of devoting time and resources to, makes me roll my eyes.
But…
If you’re going to interview him, you might as well take the Chotiner approach.
Earlier this month, the New York Times’ Anemona Hartocollis published a profile of a 27-year-old woman named Solveig Gold, the “Proud … Wife of a ‘Canceled’ Princeton Professor.” It was… cringy. Apparently, Gold’s husband is Joshua Katz, a 54-year-old former professor at Princeton who had been accused of dating his students. Oh yeah, and Gold was one of his students.
Interestingly, Hartocollis is the same Times employee who was tasked with reporting on Katz’s firing, filing multiple stories on the topic.
In my reading, the piece was clearly meant to sympathize with Gold and Katz, but some weren’t so sure.
“Having a hard time deciding whether this is satire or not,” tweeted Constanze Stelzenmüller.
Others, like New Yorker writer Emily Nussbaum, were quite convinced that the piece was meant to make Gold and Katz look bad, calling it “a masterpiece of deadpan character assassination.”
That’s why I like Chotiner’s approach to interviews. If you’re going to interview terrible people (whether Dershowitz, Gold, or anyone else), fact-check them in real-time in the article.
Here’s an excerpt of Chotiner’s interview with Dershowitz (Chotiner is the bold type, Dershowitz is the regular font, and Chotiner’s notes are italicized and in brackets):
Can you tell me a little bit about this letter you received?
It’s part of a pattern. I was the most popular speaker in the Chilmark Library series.
I can imagine.
Every year, they would have an overflow crowd to hear me speak about whatever book I was writing, or whatever I was doing. But suddenly, after I represented the Constitution on behalf of President Trump, the library found excuses for never having me. Their first excuse was that my crowds were too big. So I said, “Well, why don’t you limit the crowds?” They said, “Oh, we hadn’t thought of that.”
Can you imagine if Ed Sullivan had done that with the Beatles? It’s a ridiculous excuse.
Yeah, of course. So I’ve been cancelled, basically, by the Chilmark Library. That has resulted in lots of people in Chilmark calling me and calling the library and saying, “We’re being deprived of Alan’s annual speech.” [Ebba Hierta, the Chilmark’s director, disputed Dershowitz’s characterization, and said, “Not one single person has contacted me to complain that they haven’t had a chance to hear Alan speak.”]
Now, sure, it’s a bit funny that Dershowitz doesn’t seem to realize how ridiculous it would be to compare him to the Beatles, but the part of this that I like is that Chotiner actually fact-checked Dershowitz’s claims! Instead of just taking him at his word that he had been exiled from speaking at the Chilmark Library, Chotiner zeroed in on one of the factual claims made by Dershowitz (in this case, “…lots of people in Chilmark calling me and calling the library…”), and checked it. The result: “Not a single person has contacted me to complain that they haven’t had a chance to hear Alan speak.”
It continues:
So they’re being besieged with phone calls?
No, no. I wouldn’t say that. I’m being besieged with phone calls.
Oh, sorry.
I’m being besieged with phone calls from people saying, “Well, how come you’re not speaking this year? We look forward to it every year.” The same thing is true of the Martha’s Vineyard book fair. Every year, I was invited to speak at the Martha’s Vineyard book fair. Suddenly it stopped when I defended the Constitution on behalf of Trump. Then it happened at the Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center, where I was a frequent speaker. Suddenly I’m no longer allowed to speak there.
First they come for the library speeches, and then eventually it’s the Hebrew Center.
Yeah. The same thing is true of the Chilmark Community Center. I’ve been on the Vineyard almost fifty years. I would say every single year up until January, 2020, every single year I spoke in multiple venues on the Vineyard, always for free, so this is not about me. Obviously, it’s about the audiences. The audiences are being deprived of my voice as the result of a deliberate cancellation decision. So it’s not me who’s being cancelled. It’s the audiences who are being cancelled. [The Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center said that there has never been any discussion about not allowing Dershowitz to speak. The Martha’s Vineyard Book Festival, which is run by the Chilmark Community Center, said, “We have who we think are the most important writers.”]
Here, Chotiner checks one of Dershowitz’s other claims: “…it happened at the Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center, where I was a frequent speaker. Suddenly I’m no longer allowed to speak there.” Again, Dershowitz seems oblivious to the fact that Chotiner is mocking him by invoking Martin Niemöller’s “First They Came” poem while talking about whether or not a local library or the Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center allowed him to speak.
Still, the most important component of this is the in-line fact-check: “The Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center said that there has never been any discussion about not allowing Dershowitz to speak. The Martha’s Vineyard Book Festival, which is run by the Chilmark Community Center, said, “We have who we think are the most important writers.”
At another point, Dershowitz claimed that “Trump made a very bad joke, and people laughed. I didn’t laugh.” Chotiner added a note immediately: “He did.”
The thing about “cancel culture” stories is that they tend to rely extremely heavily on a single person’s account. That’s unacceptable.
Just as Dershowitz’s sob stories about being “canceled” from speaking at a couple of venues on Martha’s Vineyard turned out to be either disputed (at best) or lies (at worst), that’s probably true of a lot of “cancel culture” stories. For some reason, there are a lot of journalists out there who don’t think that it’s important to actually corroborate the statements they’re so eager to put in the newspaper.
For instance, the New York Times recently ran a reported piece and an opinion article claiming that the word “woman” is under attack by the left, that it has become “verboten,” etc. Nowhere in either of those pieces is a single example of a person or an organization that has so much as hinted that the word “woman” should be “banned.” But hey, it made for more exciting reading than a piece about how sometimes people say “women,” other times they say “women and girls,” other times they say, “women, girls, and others who can become pregnant,” and whatnot. Sure, the story they printed was a lie, but think of the rage-clicks!
The truth is that major news organizations like to play fast and loose with fact-checking for the sake of telling stories about culture that promote their worldview. It’s why they’re all always rushing to publish whatever someone who yells “I’ve been canceled!” has to say, truth be damned.
What I’m saying is simple: if you must publish “cancel culture” stories, it’s your duty to fact-check them into oblivion in real-time.
This alone is well worth the subscription price!
Funny, I was thinking of commenting (in response to your recent post about faulty coverage of trans issues) with a suggestion/request that you highlight news story that does it right/responsibly, and then you do that exact thing with this post!