Tuesday, August 26, 2014

THE HUFFINGTON POST ANSWERS THE QUESTION "HOW MUCH FREEDOM OF SPEECH IS TOO MUCH?"

The HUFFINGTON POST makes a definitive answer: it keeps up William Cohan's article but drops all the comments on it. So much for free speech in the Huffington Post!!!!

Now, have I lost my comment forever? And Jim Peterson had good comments, as others did. Are they all lost? Well, miracle! I have found at least a version of my comments:

Tuesday, May 20, 2014

My comment in the Huffington POST on Cohan's complaints about "free speech" on Amazon

Hershel Parker · Top Commenter · Northwestern University

As Dorothy Rabinowitz says in the WALL STREET JOURNAL, Cohan wrote a dishonest book and compounded his folly by embarking on a Media blitz in which he has made increasingly reckless false claims about the falsely-accused Duke lacrosse players. He may turn out to have said actionable lies. The WSJ on 11 April had already published a puff piece by David M. Shribman, one of many ignorant incompetent puff pieces that welcomed THE PRICE OF SILENCE. Cohan was the beneficiary of the corruption of reviewing in the mainstream media. I have a vested interest here because the President of Duke University (as he is now), Richard H. Brodhead, lied about me in the NEW YORK TIMES in June 2002, saying that only I in my "black hole" had ever heard of the book Herman Melville finished in 1860 and called POEMS. That is, the Dean of Yale College defamed me as a biographer who merely "surmised" rather than worked from documentary evidence. Of course, everyone had known about POEMS since 1922. I became interested in the non-rape case because I knew of Brodhead's dishonesty in the NEW YORK TIMES, and then became appalled at the behavior of the Gang of 88 at Duke. I have written about this at some length in MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE (published January 2013). Now, I am one of the Amazon reviewers of Cohan's THE PRICE OF SILENCE. I have also made several comments on other reviews of the book. If you go to my (admittedly long) review on Amazon you will find detailed criticism of the incompetence and even viciousness of Cohan's book. I dare to hope that Rabinowitz's review will be a turning point. This may be the time when the amateur reviewers in Amazon push the mainstream media toward honesty. Here is a comment I posted this morning on the comment by carla4515:

What's most encouraging is that the WSJ corrected itself. Someone assigned a review to someone who ought to have been responsible, David M. Shribman, boss at the Pittsburgh POST-GAZETTE. That review, published 11 April 2014, was an incompetent puff piece. So the WALL STREET JOURNAL had to look at its own mistake and decide to protect its new reputation as the most serious national reviewing newspaper (much better now than the NEW YORK TIMES) even if it meant repudiating its own review. Don't look for more reviews by the shamed Shribman in the WSJ! All this speaks very well for the seriousness of the Book Review editor at the WSJ and the integrity of some members of the editorial staff, particularly Rabinowitz herself, who paid attention to what Cohan was doing on his Media Circuit Circus as well as the falsifications in the book. I regard Rabinowitz's review as a turning point in the long-term fate of Cohan's very bad book, but I am optimistic enough to see it as just maybe a turning point in reviewing, the point where the corrupt mainstream media meets the Great Waters of the Amazon. How can I be so optimistic at almost 80? Well, I'll tell you--I'm optimistic after reading so many intelligent one-star reviews of William D. Cohan's THE PRICE OF SILENCE here on Amazon.

I will keep using the image of GREAT WATERS OF THE AMAZON in celebrating the best hope readers have of fighting the ignorance and incompetence of the mainstream media.