The Reluctant Ideological Warrior, Again, This Time Marching On DC In Favor of Abortion Rights

Again check the byline.

I have to ask at this point: At precisely what time did the Reeve-Beauchamp relationship begin? As he seems to have had a fiancee or near-fiancee in Germany, presumably there was a period when there was no relationship.

But I am wondering if it's one of those on-again, off-again type deals. And why Elspeth Reeve keeps covering former-college-classmate-future-fiancee Scott Thomas Beauchamp.

“I don’t think there’s usually enough men at these kind of events, so it’s really important to show up and support it,” said Scott Beauchamp, who endured a 24-hour bus ride from Columbia to attend Sunday’s march. “I think it’s really a civil rights issue.”

Sorry, gotta ask: Did Elspeth Reeve and Scott Beauchamp, both travelling from Missouri to DC, happen to share that busride?

This is, as J-Pod said, a tangential issue in many ways.

Still, I maintain that given TNR's disastrous history with fabulists, they should have been doing more fact checking on a young, very partisan, inexperienced, ambitious, apparently underquallified faux-journalist/blogger, not less.

Post Stephen Glass, TNR promised they had fixed their fact-checking so that this could never happen again.

And yet here we are: TNR is now "investigating" these stories for the first time.

As Foer said the other day, the previous "fact checking" was showing the stories to other embeds to see if they "smelled good." Not if they were actually true, mind you, which the other embeds could of course not have known-- but just to determine if they passed the smell test, if they were superficially plausible.

None of this, they told us, would ever happen again. They'd learned their lesson from Stephen Glass.

And of course they learned that lesson before with Ruth Shallitt.

How many times does TNR get to re-learn this lesson before it's shuttered for nearly criminal journalistic malpractice?

posted by Ace at 05:43 PM

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