I smelled a rat in the Oberlin racism narrative, and so did some other people in the conservative blogosphere, including but not limited to Michelle Malkin and Chuck Ross of The Daily Caller (who obtained the police report that confirmed our suspicions that this was a hoax).
So while Jack Marshall at Ethics Alarms directs this praise towards me, it applies equally to the other skeptics who smelled a rat at Oberlin (emphasis in original):
◾William Jacobson, who is a Cornell law school professor, notes in his report that he “smelled a rat” with the Oberlin story, and investigated. Why was this story only investigated by a blogging law professor? Where were the journalists? Why weren’t they—the Times, the Post, CNN, CBS, FOX, NBC—checking the facts? That it took this long for the truth to come out is an indictment of how lazy, inept and biased our journalistic establishment has become.◾Prof. Jacobson is an Ethics Hero. This was important work, and he set out to find the truth while smug reporters slept, and gleeful pundits on the left used a false account to implicate Republicans and conservatives.
The disinterest of the mainstream media in uncovering and addressing the hoax makes it come out of this smelling like a rat, as does the Oberlin administration’s failure to disclose the hoax to unsuspecting students.
The biggest rats of all, of course, were the pro-Obama liberal “anti-racist” students who perpetrated the racism hoax in the first place; it’s no excuse that the adults in the room (the media and administration) played along.
I was interviewed on these and related subjects yesterday morning by Arthur King on the Inside Maine radio show on 560 WGAN AM in, you guessed it, Maine.
[starting at 11:00] “Oberlin could have concluded two things: One, this was a hoax and a prank, even though a stupid prank, and two, that he was not actually motivated by racism or anti-Semitism, or any like that. And that would have just changed the whole way this thing went down, and Oberlin needs to explain why they didn’t give that explanation.”
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