Posted by Eugene Volokh:
Editors writing things they know are not accurate:
I at first didn't want to get too outraged about [1]Lewis Lapham's
writing -- before he actually had a chance to see the Republican
convention -- about "the platform on which [George W. Bush] was
trundled into New York City this August with Arnold Schwarzenegger,
the heavy law enforcement, and the paper elephants," and adding
The speeches in Madison Square Garden affirmed the great truths now
routinely preached from the pulpits of Fox News and the Wall Street
Journal--government the problem, not the solution; the social
contract a dead letter; the free market the answer to every
maiden's prayer--and while listening to the hollow rattle of the
rhetorical brass and tin, I remembered the question that [Richard]
Hofstadter didn't stay to answer. How did a set of ideas both
archaic and bizarre make its way into the center ring of the
American political circus?
The falsehood was so obvious (Harper's subscribers would read this
before the convention), and its obviousness must have been so obvious
to Lapham, that it's hard to see this as a deliberate lie. If a 5'6"
man tells you he's 5'8", that might be a lie. If he tells you he's
6'6", then it seems like something else -- a joke, maybe, or a
delusion, or irony that's way too deep for me.
But I wonder what that "something else" here. One explanation is that
Lapham wrote the column to be published after the Convention -- but
that's really not an innocent explanation: He's writing that he
listened to something, and giving his characterization of what he
heard (or at least heard about), even though at the time of writing he
hadn't actually listened to it, and thus had no opportunity to
characterize things accurately.
A more innocent explanation might be that he wrote this as a draft,
meant to go back to update this if necessary, but somehow the article
slipped out early. That's an odd way to write a column, and bespeaks a
certain closed-mindedness: I'd think most writers would have left the
paragraph blank, and filled it in afterwards, perhaps with some
telling details and with an eye towards reflecting the actual
proceedings -- yes, conventions are predictable, but they're not
completely predictable, so why mentally box oneself in with a first
draft? Nonetheless, different writers write differently, and in
principle if a writer wants to write a draft of what he expects the
article to be like, with the expectation that he'd revise it later,
that's fine.
But is this really what Lapham did? Or did he just say "Hey, I'll just
write it now as if I'd seen the whole thing, and send it now to be
printed as is later"? If it's the latter, then shouldn't someone
announce, well, a scandal or something?
Also, if this really was a screw-up, how many people had to have
screwed up for something like this to happen?
References
1. http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_08_21.shtml#1093366996
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