In 2009 I had the good fortune to make the acquaintance of Rhonda Shearer, the intrepid citizen journalist who published the aptly named Stinky Journalism website. Googling around to find some useful ammunition against Jared Diamond, the celebrity UCLA professor best known for “Guns, Germs, and Steel”, she had stumbled across my articles about that book and the more recent “Collapse” written in 2005. Shearer had discovered some quintessentially “stinky journalism” that Jared Diamond had penned for the august New Yorker Magazine that seemed to have let go of its fact-checking department after S.I. Newhouse had taken it over. Among the “facts” put forward by Diamond was the tendency of Papuan New Guinea tribesman to engage in senseless blood feuds of the sort that made the Pentagon look civilized by comparison. Since I was already worked up over Diamond’s smearing of hunting and gathering societies in “Collapse”, I was excited to enlist in Ms. Shearer’s crusade, pen in hand.
Diamond’s reputation is not what it once was, due largely in part to the investigation conducted by Stinky Journalism four years ago. To give you an idea of where things stand, I refer you to a David Correia editorial titled “F**K Jared Diamond” that appears in “Capitalism, Nature, and Socialism”, fortunately not behind a paywall, at least for the time being. full: http://louisproyect.org/2013/11/04/rhonda-shearer-versus-the-columbia-journalism-establishment/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
