Even worse than Jeffrey Goldberg’s sexist quote was his gaslighting of a journalist

The editor of the Atlantic maligned a reporter for getting the story right.

The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg took some heat on Twitter Thursday for remarks he made in an interview about why there are so few women and people of color writing cover stories at his magazine. Then he tried to pin the blame for his words on the woman journalist who published them.

Goldberg spoke with Nieman Lab’s Laura Hazard Owen about recent diversity achievements at the Atlantic, when he conceded that the writers of the print edition’s most important stories are overwhelmingly white and male. Nieman Lab noted that of the 15 issues published this year, 11 had cover stories written by men.

Here’s what Goldberg said:

It’s really, really hard to write a 10,000-word cover story. There are not a lot of journalists in America who can do it. The journalists in America who do it are almost exclusively white males. What I have to do — and I haven’t done this enough yet — is again about experience versus potential. You can look at people and be like, well, your experience is writing 1,200-word pieces for the web and you’re great at it, so good going!

That’s one way to approach it, but the other way to approach it is, huh, you’re really good at this and you have a lot of potential and you’re 33 and you’re burning with ambition, and that’s great, so let us put you on a deliberate pathway toward writing 10,000-word cover stories. It might not work. It often doesn’t. But we have to be very deliberate and efficient about creating the space for more women to develop that particular journalistic muscle.

It’s difficult to take this position seriously since there are obviously lots of women and people of color who already have the particular journalistic muscle required to write excellent longform nonfiction, as evidenced by the fact there are lots of women and people of color doing it all across America, including for the Atlantic! For example, “The Case for Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi Coates changed the political debate in the Democratic Party on the question of reparations. “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” by Anne-Marie Slaughter is a defining piece of our era on women and work.

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Brewster Kahle: what I think we’re missing out there are tools for context and citation

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necessarily know about so Wikipedia is
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still primarily created by Western young
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male contributors they tell the story of
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you know the worst knowledge from an
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extremely limited and privileged
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standpoint there are ridiculous gaps in
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this knowledge and then skews what a my
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favorite example is that there are
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20,000 articles on French Wikipedia
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about individual asteroids but a
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language like Hausa that is spoken by 30
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million people in Central Africa doesn’t
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have an entry on the universe so if you
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think that the the sum of all knowledge
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representing Wikipedia and you look at
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where it comes from and who created it
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it’s ridiculously skewed and slanted
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towards the demographic of the
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contributors the problem with that is
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not just with Wikipedia Wikipedia not
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many people they know but the contents
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get translated into our
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d/f via a project like dbpedia they’re
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then propagated to the rest of the
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internet and basically every single
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linked data system they used today what
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is like a search engine for music or
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biomedical information gets its entities
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gets is like a fundamental relations
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from Wikipedia so biasing by us out the
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fact that is a small population of
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contributors that are creating data and
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information that powers the entire
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ecosystem that AI relies upon I think
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the fundamental problem that we all
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should be worried about I’ve been very
encouraged by watching some of the
studies of how people use the web people
are very particular and very peculiar
nobody wakes up in the morning saying
hey I want to live a biased life or hey
I really want to go to the biased and
unfair news channel what I think we’re
missing out there are tools for context
and citation we’ve made it hard for
people to actually know what the hell
they’re looking at that we’ve made it so
that it’s really difficult to go and
understand is this some babble that just
has been bouncing around for a long time
and long discredited or is this um
something that actually is real and I
have trusted sources behind it
so I’m encouraged by people want to have
access to this stuff the Internet
Archive gets three four or five million
people a day coming and using its
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service as best we can tell it’s about
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the three hundredth most popular is is
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about the first the fifth most popular
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okay I’m a little envious um but it does
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indicate that there’s a lot of interest
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in finding deeper information than it’s
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casually available so people want it
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that’s the good news
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now we need to build some of the tools I
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would suggest for citation for context
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and embed it and that’s what this whole
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conference is about I’m really glad to
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be here
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sorry one last note on context I think
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you’ve gotten to the heart of a really
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really big problem which we missed out
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on the entire problem of knowledge
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production is about context not just
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merely switching from one platform to
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another but you know to take a perhaps a
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banal example at a researcher who read a
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paper of a lab that performed a set of
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experimental conditions that requires a
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context change for if you are working on
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a different organism if even if you’re
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trying to validate and reproduce those
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results that is a context change which
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requires translations so big new big
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problem we should definitely work on
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this I think with that we will wrap it
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up and just want to say thanks to the
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panelists and for coming up here and
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sharing
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[Applause]