Hello readers, Parker here.

Back in March 2004, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote a column, titled, “The Secret Of Our Sauce.” The basic gist of the piece was that outsourcing wasn’t so bad for Americans because [insert obnoxious, patriotic, very American hootin’ & hollerin’ here]. In short, we’ve got gumption, ingenuity, and other such buzzwords. You get the idea.

The entire piece is built on an interview he did with a woman who emigrated back to India to live closer to family after going to college in the U.S. When asked about the outsourcing of American jobs to India, she responded with what Friedman hyped as “a revealing story”:

''I just read about a guy in America who lost his job to India and he made a T-shirt that said, 'I lost my job to India and all I got was this [lousy] T-shirt.' And he made all kinds of money.'' Only in America, she said, shaking her head, would someone figure out how to profit from his own unemployment. And that, she insisted, was the reason America need not fear outsourcing to India: America is so much more innovative a place than any other country.

There is a reason the ''next big thing'' almost always comes out of America, said Mrs. Narayanan. When she and her husband came back to live in Bangalore and enrolled their son in a good private school, he found himself totally stifled because of the emphasis on rote learning -- rather than the independent thinking he was exposed to in his U.S. school. They had to take him out and look for another, more avant-garde private school. ''America allows you to explore your mind,'' she said. The whole concept of outsourcing was actually invented in America, added her husband, Sean, because no one else figured it out.

U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! [bald eagle soars by as fireworks explode behind Mt. Rushmore]

The shirts that weren’t.

If you’re wondering why I’m talking about a 19-year-old newspaper column, you can thank the cartoonist and old-school blogger known as Tom Tomorrow for recently posting about the battle he had with Friedman and the Times at the time. Out of curiosity, I went back to his This Modern World blog to check it out.

Tomorrow set out to find the man who made “all kinds of money” with his “I lost my job to India and all I got…” shirt. From his March 8, 2004 This Modern World post [bold emphasis mine]:

Googling the phrase as it appeared in Friedman’s column turned up nothing, but it occurred to me that the shirt was far more likely to have read “My job went to India…”, playing off the usual “Grandma went to Florida and all I got…” motif.

Well, here’s the shirt. As you will see if you follow the link, it’s not made by a plucky American entrepreneur at all — it’s being offered by a British website which provides snarky commentary on information technology issues such as outsourcing.

In other words, that guy, who made the bundle of money selling the shirts, whose triumph over adversity provides the anecdote upon which Friedman bases his entire column? He, in all probability, does not exist. The shirt is not an example of American ingenuity, turning lemons into lemonade. It’s rueful humor — British, at that — satirizing exactly that which Friedman champions.

And it took a bleary, sleep-deprived cartoonist working on his first cup of coffee about thirty seconds to determine that fact.

Oops! On March 9, 2004, Friedman (via the office of the NYT Public Editor, a role that no longer exists at the company in 2023) responded to Tomorrow:

The argument seems to be that it was a British Web site that came up with the idea of the T-shirt — “My job was lost India and all I got was this lousy T-shirt” — and therefore the whole premise of my column was wrong, that Americans are not innovative.

First, all one has to do is Google that phrase and you will discover that it is not only a British Web site offering this t-shirt for sale, but that a U.S.-based Web site, indeed one located in Palo Alto where so many jobs have been lost, has been selling the same T-shirt for some time. It is the online design-your-own t-shirt and apparel store, Zazzle.com

So either someone in America copied it — or independently came up with the idea themselves and therefore it is not a British exclusive. The point I was making about the innovative nature of American society and institutions obviously rests on more than a T-shirt.

Eventually, Tomorrow was able to track down the guy that operated that Zazzle storefront to ask a few simple questions (the exact kind of questions that Friedman or someone else at the Times should have asked prior to running the column).

1. Are you/were you unemployed?

2. Have you made a bundle of money off these t-shirts?

3. Are you American?

This is basic fact-checking. And while Friedman may have found the woman’s story “revealing,” it couldn’t be confirmed.

The man behind the Zazzle shop told Tomorrow that yes, he was American; no, he hadn’t yet lost his job (but feared that he would), and the grand total of revenue brought in by his shirt shop was “about $10 profit total.”

Yes, $10. This was the specific shop that Friedman himself pointed to in his response to Tomorrow. From Tomorrow’s March 9, 2004 update:

So there you have it. At the risk of beating a dead horse, I’ll say it one more time: this is the guy Friedman himself brought to my attention — and as it turns out, he is neither unemployed (though he fears the prospect) nor a fabulously successful t-shirt entrepreneur, having made about ten bucks off the idea so far.

The future’s not quite bright enough to necessitate sunglasses just yet, it would seem.

Look, my argument is obviously not, as Friedman interprets it, that “Americans are not innovative” — it is that selling novelty t-shirts is not a replacement for a decent paying job with health benefits.

As the man he holds up as an example makes perfectly clear, when given the chance to speak for himself.

Yes, opinion columns should be fact-checked and framed in ways that don’t mislead readers. This isn’t controversial.

Here’s something I’ve heard a lot over the years: Um, there’s a difference between a reported piece and an opinion piece. Opinion pieces don’t need to be fact-checked. That’s why they’re opinion pieces!

And, first off, whoa! That’s wildly wrong. Factual claims made in opinion pieces should be fact-checked. And, actually… Here, let me find someone else to make that point for me. Here’s a letter that I had to sign and return before the Times ran an op-ed I wrote back in 2014:

“A factual error at best detracts from, and at worst can seriously undermine, the credibility of an article and its author.” Hard agree!

Now, of course, I have absolutely no idea when this policy went into place or why the paper seemingly doesn’t apply these standards to its own columnists. What Tomorrow argued in his various responses to that 2004 Friedman column wasn’t that the premise of Friedman’s piece was wrong, but that the Times columnist was building his case about American ingenuity on a story that simply wasn’t true.

In recent years, the Times lack of editorial standards and fact-checking has become downright corrosive to the paper’s reputation.

In 2018, serial liar [edit to be just a tiny bit nicer] facts-optional writer Bari Weiss published a Times piece about the supposedly intolerant left. In it, she called right-wing media darling Dave Rubin “a liberal commentator” (lolololol), but more importantly, she linked to two tweets from a right-wing Twitter user pretending to be an “official” Antifa account to make her point.

[Leftists] seem to believe that the real cause for concern are the secret authoritarians passing as liberals and conservatives in our midst. Among them: Dave Rubin, a liberal commentator who favors abortion rights, opposes the death penalty and is married to a man, yet is denounced as an ‘Anti-L.G.B.T. fascist’ and a ‘fascist lieutenant’ for criticizing identity politics.”

As the basis for a story, “Look at what a random Twitter user said!”-type stuff is beyond weak and irresponsible. There are hundreds of millions of people on social media. You can surely find someone somewhere to make any point you want to make with a simple search. That doesn’t make that person representative of an entire political movement — certainly not when you don’t bother to confirm the authenticity of the person at all. But even worse, the account Weiss cited had been exposed as part of a coordinated campaign to “create fake accounts in an attempt to troll and discredit anti-fascist activists”

The Present Age

On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog

Back in 2014, right-wing trolls on 4chan came up with an idea: #EndFathersDay To be clear, they didn’t actually want to “end” Father’s Day. Rather, they wanted people to think that feminists wanted to “end” Father’s Day. Their plan was simple: create a bunch of fake, feminist-looking Twitter accounts, flood the internet with tweets calling for the aboli…

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9 months ago · 49 likes · 6 comments · Parker Molloy

And then, in 2019, Times columnist Bret Stephens got upset after George Washington University professor Dave Karpf made a joke on Twitter. The Times newsroom had a bedbug problem, and Karpf jokingly tweeted, “The bedbugs are a metaphor. The bedbugs are Bret Stephens.”

Stephens somehow found the tweet, got really angry about it, and emailed Karpf’s employer to try to get action taken against him. (There’s some major hypocrisy here, as Stephens, like many members of the legacy media elite, rail against “cancel culture” while demanding firings and shunning at the first sign of disrespect.) More on the ordeal can be found at the Los Angeles Times, which asked Karpf to elaborate.

dave karpf (parody account) @davekarpf

This afternoon, I tweeted a brief joke about a well-known NYT op-Ed columnist. It got 9 likes and 0 retweets. I did not @ him. He does not follow me. He just emailed me, cc’ing my university provost. He is deeply offended that I called him a metaphorical bedbug.

1:22 AM ∙ Aug 27, 2019

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68,471Likes9,245Retweets

And here’s where we get back into the problem of the Times not bothering to fact-check its columnists. Stephens was, apparently, so upset about Karpf’s comment that his next column was dedicated to it. It was titled, “World War II and the Ingredients of Slaughter,” and took pains to find evidence that “bedbug” was an antisemitic slur. As evidence of this, the Times seemed to have just typed the words “Jews as bedbugs” into a Google Books search, found something that seemed to match, and rolled with it.

southpaw @nycsouthpaw

I just followed Bret’s own link. What are we doing here? nytimes.com/2019/08/30/opi…

11:53 PM ∙ Aug 30, 2019

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13,288Likes2,288Retweets

Oh, and as it turns out, even that “bedbugs” reference in that book seems to have been about actual bedbugs, which was additional context Stephens left out of his flailing piece.

More recently, the Times published Stephens’ “The Mask Mandates Did Nothing. Will Any Lessons Be Learned?”

Here’s how it opens:

The most rigorous and comprehensive analysis of scientific studies conducted on the efficacy of masks for reducing the spread of respiratory illnesses — including Covid-19 — was published late last month. Its conclusions, said Tom Jefferson, the Oxford epidemiologist who is its lead author, were unambiguous.

“There is just no evidence that they” — masks — “make any difference,” he told the journalist Maryanne Demasi. “Full stop.”

But, wait, hold on. What about N-95 masks, as opposed to lower-quality surgical or cloth masks?

“Makes no difference — none of it,” said Jefferson.

“Its conclusions, said Tom Jefferson, the Oxford epidemiologist who is its lead author, were unambiguous.” Yeah? Is that so? Also, is there a reason Stephens keeps bouncing between discussing “mask mandates” (i.e. the government requiring people to wear masks) and simply whether “masks” themselves work?

When you read the actual analysis itself, it seems far from “unambiguous.” From the section labeled “Authors’ conclusions”:

The high risk of bias in the trials, variation in outcome measurement, and relatively low adherence with the interventions during the studies hampers drawing firm conclusions. There were additional RCTs during the pandemic related to physical interventions but a relative paucity given the importance of the question of masking and its relative effectiveness and the concomitant measures of mask adherence which would be highly relevant to the measurement of effectiveness, especially in the elderly and in young children.

There is uncertainty about the effects of face masks. The low to moderate certainty of evidence means our confidence in the effect estimate is limited, and that the true effect may be different from the observed estimate of the effect. The pooled results of RCTs did not show a clear reduction in respiratory viral infection with the use of medical/surgical masks. There were no clear differences between the use of medical/surgical masks compared with N95/P2 respirators in healthcare workers when used in routine care to reduce respiratory viral infection. Hand hygiene is likely to modestly reduce the burden of respiratory illness, and although this effect was also present when ILI and laboratory‐confirmed influenza were analysed separately, it was not found to be a significant difference for the latter two outcomes. Harms associated with physical interventions were under‐investigated.

There is a need for large, well‐designed RCTs addressing the effectiveness of many of these interventions in multiple settings and populations, as well as the impact of adherence on effectiveness, especially in those most at risk of ARIs. 

So, let’s recap: an article that confidently proclaims that mask mandates “did nothing” repeatedly bounces back and forth between discussing mandates and discussing masks themselves, is presented as an “unambiguous” final word on the issue even though the actual findings repeatedly caution against framing the paper in that way, is now being waved around by the same people who spent the pandemic coughing on strangers and singing the praises of deworming medication, as evidence that they were “right.” At the very least, Stephens’ column is extraordinarily misleading.

If only the Times held its opinion writers to some sort of standard… hrmm… Instead, they get what essentially amount to lifetime appointments (yes, somehow, Tom Friedman is still a columnist at the paper, all these years later) to say and do whatever they want, and crusade against marginalized groups without any internal pushback.

Great job, everyone. Great job.