Jeffrey Goldberg’s Checkers Update

It turns out that on Thursday Jeffrey Goldberg slipped yet another update into his “Mumbai Comes to Norway”. It was a response to the public reception of my criticism of his journalistic lapses here and here. Remarkably, Goldberg did nothing to publicize this defense of his integrity, either at The Atlantic or on Twitter (at both of which he was posting very frequently).

So far it is the only sustained attempt he’s made publicly to rebut the charge that he doctored ‘Mumbai’ on July 22 with an unacknowledged revision, since his notorious ‘gibberish’ update last Monday. Here is the latest update in full:

UPDATE ON THE UPDATE ON THE UPDATE (Thursday the 28th): Jay Rosen has pointed out that the previous paragraphs read like gibberish. He's mostly right. Here's a shorter version: I posted, updated,, erased the post by mistake, tried to restore the post, left things out of the post, then fixed the post. There are people out there -- people who are opposed to me on ideological grounds -- who are accusing me of intentionally doctoring the post. They offer no proof, however. All I can say is that the screw-ups were inadvertent.

The last three sentences here are priceless. Goldberg insinuates that his critics are out to get him “on ideological grounds”. He offers no proof for such an explosive charge.

I’m the critic who first accused him of doctoring his post, and I’d like to know why he claims to understand my ideology. And how is that ideology, whatever it may be, at war with his own? Observant readers will notice that the accusation was in fact first published at the newish website Flapola, which “exists to chronicle the absurdities of public discourse”. It’s unclear whether “the people out there” who Goldberg feels are his ideological enemies would also include journalism professor Jay Rosen of NYU. If so, that seems absurd as well. Goldberg’s update reminds one a little too much of Richard Nixon at his worst (“You've got to be a little evil to understand those people out there. You have to have known the dark side of life.”).

Goldberg demands proof that his contrived-sounding story is false. I have offered plenty of evidence, an electronic trail that calls his story into question. For example, I pointed out that the title and web address of ‘Mumbai’ only acquired the word “Updated” around 5 hours after it was originally posted. That’s hard to square with Goldberg’s statement that he added the label “update” to his first revision, which came “almost right after [he] posted originally”. Goldberg is the one with access to The Atlantic’s logs. As I’ve said several times, he could easily produce the “proof”, if those logs backed him up, to prove he’s telling the truth. He hasn’t even bothered.

“All I can say is that the screw-ups were inadvertent.” False, see my last paragraph. Goldberg can produce the evidence he claims would show that he marked the first revision of his post as an “update”. Simply repeating his undocumented assertions proves nothing.

This latest update is rather dismissive. Isn’t his journalistic reputation sufficiently worth defending that Goldberg would produce readily available evidence to back up his story?

crossposted from Flapola

The latest Jeffrey Goldberg scandal

On Monday Jeffrey Goldberg added a bizarre and nearly incomprehensible note to a highly controversial post at The Atlantic. The note sought to explain and justify an earlier, unacknowledged revision to the piece whose effect had been to make him appear less foolish. He maintains that he misled readers inadvertently by accidentally deleting the word “UPDATE” from that revision. His account was far from adequate and refers to obscure technical difficulties. Goldberg even said that he couldn’t really understand what had happened as he repeatedly revised the post the previous Friday. He promised to look into his electronic trail to figure the situation out.

Since then, however, Goldberg has added nothing to his garbled explanation. It should be a simple matter to extract from The Atlantic’s servers a record of his updates to that post, if in fact it would corroborate and clarify his flimsy account. As things are, Goldberg stands accused of deliberately doctoring a post to mask how outrageous his original post had been. Prominent journalists such as Jay Rosen have called him to task. And yet four days later Goldberg still has produced no evidence on his own behalf. His colleagues at The Atlantic remain silent as well.

There are detailed descriptions of this scandal here and here.

The facts as I understand them are as follows: Last Friday afternoon Goldberg posted a two-paragraph screed, “Mumbai Comes to Norway,” blaming the attacks unequivocally on Islamic terrorists. When events demonstrated how reckless he’d been, Goldberg added a third paragraph raising the possibility of right-wing terrorism. By not labeling this as an update, he left readers to conclude that he was just exploring multiple theories rather than using the massacre to make a bold pronouncement about the worldwide jihadist danger. Later that evening, beginning around 8 PM, Goldberg began adding 4 further paragraphs on stray thoughts, each of which he did carefully label as an “UPDATE”. At the same time he also added “(UPDATED)” to the title. So he was capable of noting updates when there was nothing to be gained from not doing so.

On Saturday, Goldberg posted a roundabout defense of his decision to rush to judgment, “On Suspecting al Qaeda in the Norway Attacks.” It is characteristically disingenuous, particularly about what he had written in “Mumbai”.

On Monday, when he learned (via James Fallows) that I had found cached evidence that he’d made those unacknowledged changes to “Mumbai”, Goldberg hurriedly added another update to the post. This was the aforementioned bizarre explanation for not having labeled the first revision as an ‘update’. It is so ridiculous it really needs to be seen to be believed.

The Atlantic needs to address this disgrace. The ‘Mumbai’ post was reprehensible to begin with. The doctoring of it is a further scandal. Goldberg’s ridiculous excuse-mongering makes matters worse. His refusal to apologize for any of it is worse still.

And as if that weren’t shameful enough, his colleagues at The Atlantic have some answering to do for ignoring or excusing all of this. On Saturday James Fallows called for the Washington Post to apologize for a Jennifer Rubin post that, like Goldberg’s, used the Norway attacks to propagandize about Islamic terrorism. His call was seconded by two other Atlantic writers. But none of them has so much as mentioned Goldberg’s reprehensible “Mumbai” post. In correspondence, Fallows bobbed and weaved when pressed about holding Goldberg to basic journalistic standards.

So will Goldberg and The Atlantic ever properly address this bundle of scandals?

Update Friday July 29: James Fallows finally responds here to the allegations of wrongdoing and hypocrisy. It’s pretty thin stuff. He states that Goldberg was having connectivity problems “that morning” and would have to be crazy to lie about the circumstances of his unlabeled update to ‘Mumbai’ (from later in the day).

Also, our system logs changes, and any of us would be additionally crazy, knowing that, to pretend that something happened if it didn't.

Setting aside the fact that Goldberg has said some pretty crazy things – for example, rushing to blame the Norway attacks on Muslim terrorists – apparently neither Fallows nor Goldberg has made any effort to dig out those logs to prove that Goldberg misled his readers accidentally as he claims. As I’ve noted repeatedly, it should be a simple thing to produce that evidence if it actually backs up Goldberg’s story. Further, Goldberg said that his memory is hazy and his convoluted account is nearly incomprehensible. So why is nobody at The Atlantic trying to clarify what is otherwise an extreme embarrassment for them?

As regards the issue of whether he should condemn Goldberg’s rush to use the massacre to score points, Fallows argues (a) that others did not condemn Goldberg either, and (b) he didn’t see ‘Mumbai’ until Goldberg had already tried to walk back some of its extremism. Left unaddressed, I think, is whether Fallows and The Atlantic should condemn it now that he realizes it was originally as indefensible a post as the Jennifer Rubin piece he denounced. Goldberg has not admitted that he was wrong to post it. Quite the contrary, he continues to defend the decision. Goldberg is still trying to portray the controversy disingenuously as criticism that he merely ‘suspected’ al Qaeda’s involvement in Norway. That is intellectually dishonest (not to say crazy given that people can go back and read what he wrote).

crossposted at Flapola

Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic, and journalistic ethics

On Friday, just after the horrific attacks in Norway, Jeffrey Goldberg posted this two-paragraph screed, “Mumbai Comes to Norway,” in which he pinned the blame squarely and without equivocation upon Islamic terrorists: “Jihadists did this in Norway because they could.” Of course, he had no substantive evidence for the inflammatory assertion. Any rush to judgment is foolish. This was reprehensible. Some of his critics would also say it is characteristic of Goldberg’s work.

Since then no apology has been forthcoming from Goldberg. Quite the contrary, on Saturday he doubled down, posting “On Suspecting al Qaeda in the Norway Attacks.” This purports to be a defense of other writers who similarly had rushed to denounce Muslims for the murders. However that is disingenuous; Goldberg plainly intended the piece as a roundabout way to justify his earlier ‘Mumbai’ post. And yet he managed to say almost nothing specific about what he’d actually written the previous day, though some of what he did say about ‘Mumbai’ was inaccurate and disingenuous. Remarkably, he didn’t even provide a link to ‘Mumbai’. (After I wrote to him criticizing his failure to link to his own work, he published a ridiculous revision of ‘Suspecting’ on Monday in which he blamed that failure on vague technical problems; apparently we’re supposed to believe that his own ‘Mumbai’ post was the one relevant link he was prevented somehow from including.) Thus, Goldberg’s purpose in ‘Suspecting’ was to persuade readers that he had had every reason to join others in blaming Islamists in ‘Mumbai’, and hence was not himself to blame.

In the aftermath, nobody else at The Atlantic has criticized either of Goldberg’s controversial posts much less called for an apology. Indeed, none of their writers have even mentioned them.

This despite the fact that James Fallows on Saturday rebuked the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin and called for an apology for her own rush to judgment. Fallows repeatedly updated that post as he recorded how much time had elapsed without an apology from Rubin. Her piece, as reprehensible as it is, was surely no more extreme than what his Atlantic colleague Goldberg had written and then defended. In fact, Rubin’s original post had acknowledged, by the back door, at least the possibility that the attacks in Norway were not the work of Islamic terrorists. Goldberg’s ‘Mumbai’ post, by contrast, originally expressed total certainty in blaming Muslims.

Fallows’ denunciation of Rubin was quickly joined by two other colleagues at The Atlantic, Steve Clemons (here and here) and Ta-Nihisi Coates. Nevertheless none of them to date has said a thing about their colleague Goldberg’s two controversial posts.

I wrote to Fallows on Saturday asking why Goldberg did not owe an apology as well. In correspondence over several days, Fallows repeatedly defended his colleague, minimized his journalistic lapses, accepted Goldberg’s ridiculous self-justifications or offered his own, and avoided as far as possible taking any action to hold Goldberg to account for such gross unprofessionalism.

It gets even worse.

On Monday I gave Fallows evidence showing that Goldberg had substantially revised his original ‘Mumbai’ post sometime later on Friday, making himself appear less imprudent by appending a final (third) paragraph. That paragraph mentions the possibility the attacks were the work of a right-wing terrorist. This radical revision of the original post was in line with the police report that afternoon about the blond Norwegian who had been arrested. But Goldberg did not mention that he’d made any changes to ‘Mumbai’. His silence left the reader to assume that his absolutely confident assertions about Islamic terrorists at the top of the post were really intended all along to be taken as just one of several possible theories, including the scenario he mentions at the end.

It is egregiously wrong to revise a post so substantially as to alter its meaning or intended interpretation without signaling that a revision was made. In terms of journalistic standards, an unacknowledged revision as radical as this is just as reprehensible as Goldberg’s original offense of rushing out inflammatory allegations without evidence to back them up.

Fallows response upon receiving this information was, at first, to say nothing more than he hadn’t known about the unacknowledged addition of the third paragraph. (I should add that, in his first email to me on Saturday, Fallows had based his defense of Goldberg entirely on this third paragraph, which he described as the “caveat” that raised Goldberg’s post above the level of Rubin’s. To my mind it was transparently an afterthought, one that scarcely mitigated Goldberg’s clear intention to pin the blame on Islamists. But for Fallows it was the key that made it permissible to criticize Rubin while saying nothing about his colleague.)

So I pressed Fallows again about what he would do now that he did know of the unacknowledged revision. Fallows finally said that he would look into it.

A short time afterward on Monday evening, Jeffrey Goldberg revised his ‘Mumbai’ post again, this time in order to justify his failure earlier to mention the first revision. His rambling excuse is such gibberish that a reasonable interpretation would be he intended it to be nearly incomprehensible. It reads like the blather you’d associate more with a Jeffrey Lebowski than a journalist at The Atlantic. This update is easily the most ridiculous thing I have ever seen in the established news media.

UPDATE ON THE PREVIOUS UPDATE (Monday the 25th): A number of readers have pointed out that my previous caveat give the impression that it was an instantaneous caveat, when in fact it wasn't. It was written a short while after the original post went up, and was labeled "Update" originally (I've since affixed the word "update" to it again. What happened was that I was driving and had connectivity problems, and so when I added further updates (below), I inadvertently erased the whole post, and had to rescue it from a Word document, but in re-posting that word document (or most of it—I saved only most of it) I dropped the word "update," along with a couple of other things. And then I thought I had saved it and posted it, when it fact the "save" didn't go through until a later "save" of another update. When the post went out on my RSS feed, I believe it still had the word "update" in it. Though I don't know for sure, but will check my RSS feed when I get back. I'm sorry this sounds so confusing, but I want to clear up the impression that I folded in caveats later without saying that they were added later. In truth, I can't figure out what happened, because I thought when I wrote the aforementioned caveat, it had successfully posted, when it seems that it hadn't.

i barely understand the previous paragraph. Suffice it to say I don't want to leave anyone with either the impression that the caveat paragraph was posted simultaneously with the original content of the post, or that it was added hours or days later. I wrote it almost right after I posted originally, but it apparently wasn't saved into text until one of the next times I opened up this post. My bad—no blogging and driving for me. And of course it was my bad not to lard even more caveats into the post in the first place.

Goldberg’s account of why he failed until late Monday evening to mention Friday’s radical update is not even remotely convincing. My reasons for rejecting his convoluted self-justification will be left to another post (see below). My point here is that, on its face, his Monday evening blather strains credulity. And yet Fallows seems to accept it. He told me nothing about what he learned upon looking into the matter. Instead he just sent me without comment the link to Goldberg’s explanation. Fallows has not responded to my further emails challenging the explanation.

In short, James Fallows is again excusing his colleague Jeffrey Goldberg’s egregious practices. Sad to say, it is not for the first time. One would have thought that Goldberg’s journalistic credentials would be in tatters long before now given the appalling record of inaccuracies, blithe inconsistencies, and gross biases that mark him out as a propagandist in foreign affairs. Are there no professional penalties to be paid for shamelessly advocating for a disastrous war as in Iraq? Evidently not. Goldberg’s friends and colleagues repeatedly have shielded him from justified criticism and even promoted him, no matter what he gets up to.

As so often, there appears to be a double standard among Beltway insiders. Those whom one is friendly with are good and serious people simply because one knows them to be, and therefore one’s friends must be placed effectively above criticism. No amount of public embarrassment is allowed to pierce this bubble of impunity.

And there can be few things more embarrassing than the preposterous and pathetic self defense Goldberg published on Monday evening in the final revision of ‘Mumbai’. Never mind for now Goldberg’s obvious disingenuousness, or his tone or the rather terrified-sounding gobbledy-gook prose. I would note simply that the premise of his explanation – that vague technical difficulties were to blame for his failure over three full days to mention the radical revision on Friday of the ‘Mumbai’ post – is nearly identical to the unconvincing explanation he’d already offered in ‘Suspecting’ for his failure to provide a link back to ‘Mumbai’.

I can’t help but notice that Goldberg had posted a longish series of uncontroversial things on Friday and Saturday at The Atlantic, without ever mentioning or seeming to have technical difficulties. But on Monday, as he sees himself under criticism for what clearly was highly controversial writing, Goldberg suddenly became all chatty in his updates to both ‘Suspecting’ and ‘Mumbai’ about how technical difficulties had been undermining him right and left, two and three days earlier, thus spoiling all his very admirable intentions. Curiously, they were spoiling his intentions only with regard to the inflammatory posts. The non-controversial posts all managed to bypass the technical gremlins somehow.

I’m reminded of the phony-sounding, convoluted narratives that undergraduate students offer up so often when they’re caught red-handed in something like plagiarism. Vague and nearly incomprehensible technical difficulties, as it happens, often turn out to be the actual culprits – not the authors themselves, apart that is from their acknowledging some slight element of sloppiness in not overcoming a series of almost unparalleled challenges in order to compel those pesky machines to do things right.

And so too with Jeffrey Goldberg, who assures us that despite his best of intentions it was the machines that made his two controversial posts seem unethical. But he’s set the record straight now because he wouldn’t want to leave his readers with the impression that he radically revised his ‘Mumbai’ post without acknowledging the revision. Except, that is, for the three days in which he did give that impression.

Fallows was right that Rubin owed an apology for her terrible misuse of the terrorist attacks in Norway to push her own agenda. He is wrong not to call for an apology from Goldberg as well. The Atlantic needs to sanction Goldberg for that reprehensible ‘Mumbai’ post, as well as for revising it later to make it seem less extreme while leaving readers for three days to assume that no repairs had been done to it. His excuse mongering on Monday also warrants an investigation, though I doubt it’s possible ever to get to the bottom of whatever it is Goldberg is claiming.

I am leaving to a second post, which can be found here, my detailed description of what Goldberg posted and when, and my analysis of that. I’ll also discuss Fallow’s record in this a little further.

Update, Wed. July 27: This evening at 6:39 ET, shortly after these two pieces were posted and crossposted at two other sites, the google cache for the original version of Goldberg's 'Mumbai' post was overwritten with the current version of the page. However I have a screen grab of the original version, should anybody wish to consult it. I have quoted its text in its entirety.

Update Two, Friday July 29: James Fallows finally responds here to the allegations of wrongdoing and hypocrisy. It’s pretty thin stuff. He states that Goldberg was having connectivity problems “that morning” and would have to be crazy to lie about the circumstances of his unlabeled update to ‘Mumbai’ (from later in the day).

Also, our system logs changes, and any of us would be additionally crazy, knowing that, to pretend that something happened if it didn't.

Setting aside the fact that Goldberg has said some pretty crazy things – for example, rushing to blame the Norway attacks on Muslim terrorists – apparently neither Fallows nor Goldberg has made any effort to dig out those logs to prove that Goldberg misled his readers accidentally as he claims. As I’ve noted repeatedly, it should be a simple thing to produce that evidence if it actually backs up Goldberg’s story. Further, Goldberg said that his memory is hazy and his convoluted account is nearly incomprehensible. So why is nobody at The Atlantic trying to clarify what is otherwise an extreme embarrassment for them?

As regards the issue of whether he should condemn Goldberg’s rush to use the massacre to score points, Fallows argues (a) that others did not condemn Goldberg either, and (b) he didn’t see ‘Mumbai’ until Goldberg had already tried to walk back some of its extremism. Left unaddressed, I think, is whether Fallows and The Atlantic should condemn it now that he realizes it was originally as indefensible a post as the Jennifer Rubin piece he denounced. Goldberg has not admitted that he was wrong to post it. Quite the contrary, he continues to defend the decision. Goldberg is still trying to portray the controversy disingenuously as criticism that he merely ‘suspected’ al Qaeda’s involvement in Norway. That is intellectually dishonest (not to say crazy given that people can go back and read what he wrote).

crossposted from Flapola

No Shame at The Atlantic?

As discussed here, The Atlantic disgraced itself over the weekend with two posts about the Norway attacks by Jeffrey Goldberg, subsequently updated disingenuously and bizarrely. Goldberg initially blamed the Norway attacks on Muslim terrorists, and then rather than retract and apologize for his reprehensible first post, he performed stupefying back-flips trying to justify the unjustifiable. In addition, three other Atlantic authors (James Fallows, Steve Clemons, and Ta-Nehisi Coates) made common cause in rebuking a Washington Post author (Jennifer Rubin) for her own grotesque rush to judgment, but nevertheless have managed to avoid even mentioning their colleague Goldberg’s offenses. Fallows in particular was notified of one especially egregious impropriety Goldberg engaged in, but rather than condemn it Fallows appears to have accepted Goldberg’s dubious and convoluted excuses. It’s a bundle of journalistic lapses shamelessly committed and just as shamelessly swept under the carpet.

The purpose here is to describe the events as I understand them and assess them in detail.

On Friday July 22, Jeffrey Goldberg posted “Mumbai Comes to Norway”. The link is to a cache of the original version of the post. The text reads:

I'm following news of the Norway attacks like the rest of you, and am curious to see, among other things, Norway's response. I hope it is not to pull troops out of Afghanistan; this would only breed more attacks. So, why Norway? It doesn't seem likely, on the surface. There are many countries with more troops in Afghanistan than Norway; and there are several countries whose newspapers have printed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. My first reaction is two-fold: 1) Jihadists did this in Norway because they could. Norway is pretty well-known among homeland-security types for being among the softer, less-defended countries of the West, and 2) Norway is making moves to expel a jihadist called Mullah Krekar, who is one of the founders of Ansar al-Islam, the al Qaeda-affiliated group that operated in Iraqi Kurdistan with some help from Saddam's intelligence services. This could be a message about his coming deportation.

Of course, asking the question, "Why did jihadists attack (x)?" could lead people to believe that these sorts of attacks are responses to particular events. They are not. At the deepest level, they are responses to Western existence.

It is inflammatory. The entire piece, beginning with the title, presumes that the attacks were of course committed by Muslims. There isn’t even the slightest trace of doubt about that. The second bombastic paragraph could not be more sweeping or authoritative: Islamists seek to kill us because we exist, and softness invites attack. That is rhetoric in search of evidence, which Goldberg was eager to find in the current massacre.

Journalistic ethics, which don’t encourage rushing to judgment, certainly would have required Goldberg to issue a retraction as soon as possible after it became clear that afternoon that the only suspect in custody was a native Norwegian.

Instead, Goldberg revised ‘Mumbai’ by bolstering his second paragraph with two further sentences and adding a third paragraph. The third paragraph mentions the possibility that it was a case of right-wing terrorism, only to suggest further ways that it could still be linked to Muslims. He also remarks that he is “confused” about who was responsible. The effect of this radical revision was to make his extremely imprudent, one-sided, and indefensible original post seem less so.

Later that evening Goldberg made three further revisions to ‘Mumbai’ with stray thoughts and links. These are labeled “UPDATE”, “UPDATE 2”, and “UPDATE 3”. By stages he seems to be relinquishing his obsession with the non-existent Muslim connection.

Here is a cached version of the updated ‘Mumbai’ from around dawn the following morning. Notice that the original, radical revision still is not set apart as an update (in fact it begins in the middle of the second paragraph), and thus gives the impression that the third paragraph in particular was actually part of the original argument.

I'm following news of the Norway attacks like the rest of you, and am curious to see, among other things, Norway's response. I hope it is not to pull troops out of Afghanistan; this would only breed more attacks. So, why Norway? It doesn't seem likely, on the surface, if this is jihadist in origin. There are many countries with more troops in Afghanistan than Norway; and there are several countries whose newspapers have printed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. My first reaction is two-fold: 1) Jihadists did this in Norway because they could. Norway is pretty well-known among homeland-security types for being among the softer, less-defended countries of the West, and 2) Norway is making moves to expel a jihadist called Mullah Krekar, who is one of the founders of Ansar al-Islam, the al Qaeda-affiliated group that operated in Iraqi Kurdistan with some help from Saddam's intelligence services. This could be a message about his coming deportation.

Of course, asking the question, "Why did jihadists attack (x)?" could lead people to believe that these sorts of attacks are responses to particular events. They are not. At the deepest level, they are responses to Western existence. I know that this sort of statement sounds too Bushian for some people, but I tend to think that many hardcore jihadists—i.e. ones who are willing to murder innocent people—develop a deep desire to murder infidels, and only then go looking for specific places to do this murder, and only then gin-up weak rationalizations for the murder. In other words, the list of ostensible grievances is endless.

Of course, this could an act of right-wing extremism, perhaps in reaction to the rise of radical Islamism in Europe. I'm as confused as the rest of you are about the authorship of these attacks. There have been early claims of responsibility by jihadist groups, followed by denials, followed by reports that a blonde "Nordic-looking" man was the one who opened fire on the youth camp. Was this "Nordic-looking" man an Adam Gadahn-type, or someone not motivated by jihadist ideology? Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Here's an interesting story from Atlantic.com about why jihadists seem to have it in for Norway, if indeed this attack was jihadist-inspired. And because this might be domestic right-wing extremism in origin, I'm looking for something to read about Norwegian extremist groups. If anyone has any recommendations, I'll post and link.

UPDATE 2: This looks promising -- http://bit.ly/rlnhB2

UPDATE 3: I'm sure someone on the Internets has pointed this out already, but if these are the acts of a Norwegian lone wolf—massive car bomb and point-blank massacre in a different location hours later—then this guy is a true terror prodigy, the Muhammad Atta of Norway. Terrorism is hard to do. This is one of the reasons the U.S. hasn't been hit by an organized plot since 9/11. Most psychopaths are incompetent at killing. This is our saving grace.

Later that morning an “UPDATE 4” was appended to ‘Mumbai’, which is how the post remained for more than two days, until Monday evening.

A blogger who posts at AbsurdBeats tells me that on Friday she read the original unrevised version of ‘Mumbai’, and later several times returned and saw the radically revised version before any of the further revisions that were marked as an “UPDATE” had been added. At no point did she see any indication that the radical revision (the 2nd/3rd paragraphs) was acknowledged as an update. On Monday evening she commented about that fact in this thread at The Atlantic:

It was two paragraphs straight-up on jihadis and why they might attack Norway, with, if I remember correctly, some mention of the impending deportation of Mullah Krekar; it could even have been those first two paragraphs of what is now a much longer post.

There was no "Of course, this could an act of right-wing extremism, perhaps in reaction to the rise of radical Islamism in Europe. . . . " That was added later, although, lacking an "update" notice, makes it appear as if it were a part of the original post.

The apparent implication, that Goldberg had been audacious in transforming his commentary to such an extent, was troubling so I searched for and found a cached version of the original post from Friday afternoon (which is linked and quoted above). I sent this evidence of an unacknowledged revision to James Fallows (with whom I’d been corresponding about Goldberg). He said he’d look into it. Shortly afterwards, late on Monday evening, Goldberg revised ‘Mumbai’ a final time. The passage quoted below begins with the second paragraph and includes all the changes he made then:

Of course, asking the question, "Why did jihadists attack (x)?" could lead people to believe that these sorts of attacks are responses to particular events. They are not. At the deepest level, they are responses to Western existence. I know that this sort of statement sounds too Bushian for some people, but I tend to think that many hardcore jihadists—i.e. ones who are willing to murder innocent people—develop a deep desire to murder infidels, and only then go looking for specific places to do this murder, and only then gin-up weak rationalizations for the murder. In other words, the list of ostensible grievances is endless.

UPDATE: Of course, this could an act of right-wing extremism, perhaps in reaction to the rise of radical Islamism in Europe. I'm as confused as the rest of you are about the authorship of these attacks. There have been early claims of responsibility by jihadist groups, followed by denials, followed by reports that a blonde "Nordic-looking" man was the one who opened fire on the youth camp. Was this "Nordic-looking" man an Adam Gadahn-type, or someone not motivated by jihadist ideology? Stay tuned.

UPDATE ON THE PREVIOUS UPDATE (Monday the 25th): A number of readers have pointed out that my previous caveat give the impression that it was an instantaneous caveat, when in fact it wasn't. It was written a short while after the original post went up, and was labeled "Update" originally (I've since affixed the word "update" to it again. What happened was that I was driving and had connectivity problems, and so when I added further updates (below), I inadvertently erased the whole post, and had to rescue it from a Word document, but in re-posting that word document (or most of it—I saved only most of it) I dropped the word "update," along with a couple of other things. And then I thought I had saved it and posted it, when it fact the "save" didn't go through until a later "save" of another update. When the post went out on my RSS feed, I believe it still had the word "update" in it. Though I don't know for sure, but will check my RSS feed when I get back. I'm sorry this sounds so confusing, but I want to clear up the impression that I folded in caveats later without saying that they were added later. In truth, I can't figure out what happened, because I thought when I wrote the aforementioned caveat, it had successfully posted, when it seems that it hadn't.

i barely understand the previous paragraph. Suffice it to say I don't want to leave anyone with either the impression that the caveat paragraph was posted simultaneously with the original content of the post, or that it was added hours or days later. I wrote it almost right after I posted originally, but it apparently wasn't saved into text until one of the next times I opened up this post. My bad—no blogging and driving for me. And of course it was my bad not to lard even more caveats into the post in the first place.

UPDATE: Here's an interesting story from Atlantic.com about why jihadists [… etc.]

Even if one cares to believe this explanation, it is not an adequate excuse. Goldberg left the first revision unacknowledged for three days. He acknowledged it only after he learned somebody had discovered the situation, and did so only on a post that most readers had long since left behind.

It’s also disingenuous. “A number of readers” pointed out how he had misled? What number? It looks as if Goldberg prefers not to admit that he acted only after I turned over to Fallows a cache of his original post. (The term ‘caveat’ is how Fallows had been describing Goldberg’s third paragraph in our correspondence; see below.)

And as regards his “my bad not to lard even more caveats into the post in the first place”, there were no caveats whatever in the original post. Not one. To talk about “even more caveats” is to deny the very nature of his original post. How extraordinarily ironic to conclude this update with a fiction that denies the very consequence of the update.

As regards the substance of his explanation, it is nearly incomprehensible, perhaps intentionally so. I have rarely read such gibberish. To me these seem like the plaintive and desperate words of somebody who has been caught red-handed in an unethical operation. In so far as I understand the ‘facts’ Goldberg alleges, I don’t find them credible. Here are some reasons why:

(a) The first revision actually began in the middle of the second paragraph. That’s hard to square with his explanation. He would have had to have ‘dropped’ two hard returns as well as the word “UPDATE” in his Word document when (as he claims) he reposted the whole text. He would also have to have forgotten within a very short time that he had updated and that there were now meant to be four rather than three paragraphs. Besides, Word documents don’t tend to delete late changes when you close them, unless you put some effort into losing material.

(b) All four other updates are numbered in order (except the second, which is simply labeled “UPDATE”). How does it happen that the first “update” has so little purchase that it doesn’t even affect the numbering system?

(c) His claim that he was distracted from blogging while driving, while barely possible, suggests he should be arrested for recklessness.

(d) The “UPDATE” in the post’s title and in its web address appeared only some 2 ½ to 5 hours after ‘Mumbai’ was originally posted, to judge by a review of cached pages from The Atlantic (see e.g. the google caches of Derek Thompson’s posts that day). Goldberg claims (above) that he added the ‘caveat’ paragraph “almost right after I posted originally” and not hours later, and that initially he notified readers that the ‘caveat’ was an ‘update’. So why does neither the title nor the web address for ‘Mumbai’ include ‘update’ until hours later on Friday evening?

(e) Goldberg posted other things at The Atlantic on Friday afternoon and evening with no apparent technical difficulties.

(f) His vague tale of repeated, obscure technical difficulties compounded by his own haplessness plus an astoundingly convenient three-day episode of amnesia sounds contrived. I’ve heard all too many similar tales from undergraduates when they’ve been caught plagiarizing papers. Such tales make a virtue of patheticness, and Goldberg’s explanation is nothing if not pathetic.

(g) Just as his excuse here is predicated on insurmountable technical difficulties, so too his excuse with regard to a lapse in his second controversial post (see below) is predicated on insurmountable technical difficulties. Both excuses were dredged up and published on Monday, after Goldberg found his lapses facing criticism. In both instances, the alleged technical difficulties evidently impinged on his work only to the extent that he was facing criticism.

(h) His explanation does not appear to be subject to proof. Apart from some probably unverifiable claims about technical difficulties, it ends up being a non-explanation. Goldberg says “I can't figure out what happened” and he leaves himself ample room to evade, revise or abandon the few assertions he does seem to make.

(i) It is transparently true that on Monday Goldberg could not get even the most basic things right about his ‘Mumbai’ updates from Friday. He slaps the new label “UPDATE” before the third paragraph rather than where it belongs, before the fourth sentence in the second paragraph. So how was he able on Monday to provide so many other florid details (however vaguely described) from his various technical adventures, and how was he certain that he labeled the first revision as an ‘update’, when he couldn’t even remember where the original post ended?

It would be a fairly simple matter to extract evidence to support his story of multiple updates from The Atlantic’s servers, if his version of events is accurate. That would also permit Goldberg to clarify what he says he can’t figure out. However no such evidence or clarification has been forthcoming for the last two days. The matter has simply been dropped.

On Saturday July 23 Jeffrey Goldberg returned to the fray with “On Suspecting al Qaeda in the Norway Attacks.” It purports to be a defense of others, especially Jennifer Rubin, who had rushed to blame the attacks on Muslims without waiting for actual evidence.

Clearly though it was designed at least as much as a justification for his now embarrassing ‘Mumbai’ post. He mentions his own controversial post in passing, but without much information a reader would need to understand what he’d written. It’s especially remarkable that he neglected to link to ‘Mumbai’ or cite its inflammatory title, though he linked to plenty of other people’s posts in ‘Suspecting’.

Some of what he says is frankly disingenuous. His main line of defense is that people like Rubin were justified in their speculation if only because The Atlantic had reposted an old piece by Hegghammer and Tierney on Norway’s problem with al Qaeda. He implies it influenced his decision to write ‘Mumbai’.

So it would have been possible, from reading The Atlantic alone, to suspect al Qaeda involvement in the Norway attacks. I myself suspected this, and wrote so.

The truth is that Goldberg noted the Hegghammer/Tierney article only as a late update to ‘Mumbai’.

He also doesn’t acknowledge that ‘Mumbai’ originally, even more than Rubin’s terrible post, blamed the attacks definitively and exclusively on Islamic terrorists. In fact, he disingenuously said:

To be sure, I wrote into my coverage a bunch of "to be sure" statements, along the lines of "if this in fact a jihadist attack," and, "perhaps this was an act of right-wing extremism," but I certainly suspected al Qaeda involvement initially.

There were not in fact a “bunch” of such statements, even in the fully updated version, just the two phrases he (mis)quotes. In any case the relevant point – about assessing the rush to blame Islamists – is that Goldberg’s original post contained not even one such statement.

On top of ‘Mumbai’, this was disgraceful stuff. I wrote to Goldberg explaining that I found ‘Suspecting’ to be disingenuous about what he had actually written, and asking why he had neglected to provide a link so that readers could assess his assessment of himself. Goldberg didn’t respond, but on Monday he revised ‘Suspecting’ to take account of such criticisms. The revision strikes me as a travesty.

To begin with, although he added a link to ‘Mumbai’ (as well as the title), Goldberg managed to imply that his earlier failure to do it had been caused by technical difficulties. Apparently, too, we’re supposed to imagine that by bad luck it was only his own post that he had been prevented from linking to:

I've added a link to the piece I wrote (I'm having terrible Interweb problems where I am, and this process of adding a couple of links has now been going on for a half-hour) […]

The very chattiness calls attention to its phoniness. The implication doesn’t stand up to scrutiny; was he having “Interweb problems” on Saturday as well? Anyhow there’s really no excuse in an internet apologia not to link to one’s post that one is trying to justify.

Additionally, Goldberg replies to the criticisms of ‘Mumbai’ by turning them into the worst kind of straw man. I[t i]s too preposterous to bother quoting here, but [this] serves as a measure of how seriously [he] engages with legitimate criticisms of his work. Even when he has posted something as scandalously unbalanced as ‘Mumbai’, Goldberg can’t face up to what he has done wrong. He prefers evasion and smokescreens and denial.

This is of course relevant to any assessment of the convoluted excuse he posted later on Monday evening for having failed to label his first revision of ‘Mumbai’ as an ‘update’.

To sum up, we had two posts from Jeffrey Goldberg that fell well short of journalistic standards, in both their original forms and in their disingenuous updates. ‘Mumbai’ in particular was reprehensible from the start and ought to have been corrected, apologized for, and sanctioned.

When I saw that James Fallows had (rightly) rebuked Jennifer Rubin and called for an apology from the Washington Post for her own rush to judgment, I asked Fallows why The Atlantic doesn’t owe an apology as well for Goldberg’s ‘Mumbai’. He replied that he hadn’t read it until after he’d posted on Rubin, but anyway Goldberg had “included some ‘caveats’ that she didn’t.” He meant the third paragraph of ‘Mumbai’.

On Monday evening after discovering that the third paragraph was in fact an unacknowledged revision, I sent the evidence to Fallows. His response was simply to state that he didn’t know about an unacknowledged revision. It was only after I pressed him on it (“And now that you do?”) did Fallows allow that he would “look into this”.

I never learned what the investigation found, but a short time later Fallows sent without comment a link to Goldberg’s final revision of ‘Mumbai’ with its seemingly preposterous excuse for misleading readers.

Even though the ‘caveats’ he mentioned on Saturday had disappeared into thin air on Monday, Fallows did not and has not criticized Goldberg publicly. In fact, neither he nor the other Atlantic authors who took Rubin to task (Steve Clemons and Ta-Nehisi Coates) have so much as mentioned Goldberg’s controversial posts in writing. Fallows at least is well aware of them. This is the purest double-standard, and in Fallows’ case a circling of the wagons.

The Atlantic faces a tangle of journalistic lapses:

(a) Jeffrey Goldberg’s original reprehensible ‘Mumbai’ post

(b) Goldberg’s failure to signpost for readers a radical revision of ‘Mumbai’

(c) Goldberg’s seemingly incredible excuse for (b)

(d) Goldberg’s disingenuous ‘Suspect’ post

(e) the failure, or refusal (?), of Atlantic authors, especially James Fallows, to hold their colleagues to the same journalistic standards they hold others to

It is a harvest of shame.

Update, Wed. July 27: This evening at 6:39 ET, shortly after these two pieces were posted and crossposted at two other sites, the google cache for the original version of Goldberg's 'Mumbai' post was overwritten with the current version of the page. However I have a screen grab of the original version, should anybody wish to consult it. I have quoted its text in its entirety.

Update Two, Thursday: This Goldberg tweet at 7:52 PM on Friday is very probably nearly contemporaneous with the first addition to 'Mumbai' that he actually labeled as an "UPDATE" (which includes this: "I'm looking for something to read about Norwegian extremist groups. If anyone has any recommendations, I'll post and link.") That helps to confirm what I said here, that the first time his 'Mumbai' title included the word "UPDATED" was between 5:30 and 8:00 PM. The label "UPDATE" did not come into play until five hours after the post originally went up.

I’ve tidied up the English in one sentence here, marking additions with square brackets [ ].

Update Three, Friday July 29: James Fallows finally responds here to the allegations of wrongdoing and hypocrisy. It’s pretty thin stuff. He states that Goldberg was having connectivity problems “that morning” and would have to be crazy to lie about the circumstances of his unlabeled update to ‘Mumbai’ (from later in the day).

Also, our system logs changes, and any of us would be additionally crazy, knowing that, to pretend that something happened if it didn't.

Setting aside the fact that Goldberg has said some pretty crazy things – for example, rushing to blame the Norway attacks on Muslim terrorists – apparently neither Fallows nor Goldberg has made any effort to dig out those logs to prove that Goldberg misled his readers accidentally as he claims. As I’ve noted repeatedly, it should be a simple thing to produce that evidence if it actually backs up Goldberg’s story. Further, Goldberg said that his memory is hazy and his convoluted account is nearly incomprehensible. So why is nobody at The Atlantic trying to clarify what is otherwise an extreme embarrassment for them?

As regards the issue of whether he should condemn Goldberg’s rush to use the massacre to score points, Fallows argues (a) that others did not condemn Goldberg either, and (b) he didn’t see ‘Mumbai’ until Goldberg had already tried to walk back some of its extremism. Left unaddressed, I think, is whether Fallows and The Atlantic should condemn it now that he realizes it was originally as indefensible a post as the Jennifer Rubin piece he denounced. Goldberg has not admitted that he was wrong to post it. Quite the contrary, he continues to defend the decision. Goldberg is still trying to portray the controversy disingenuously as criticism that he merely ‘suspected’ al Qaeda’s involvement in Norway. That is intellectually dishonest (not to say crazy given that people can go back and read what he wrote).

crossposted from Flapola