castaway

The most shocking thing about @SulkinMaya's blatant fabrication isn't anything to do with her personally. It's that her video somehow made it through the editorial process at @TheFP and *nobody* noticed the error. This is not a small error! She said that a speech was in Arabic when (excepting four words) that speech was entirely in English! What are you doing here??? I mean this as a very serious question for @EliLake, @bariweiss, and several of the other FP people who follow me: Does The Free Press have an editorial process? Like, at all? If so, can you describe it to me? Who was in charge of making sure Maya's claims were factually accurate? How could this possibly have slipped by? I do not understand how an organization with your level of money and scale could just whiff like that. For those of you not deep in journalism world, this is not normal. At @TheArgumentMag, a publication with far less publicity, fewer employees and fewer paid subscribers, I have copy editors up my ass if I misstate a statistic by one percent or don't have a foolproof quote to back up every single claim I make in an article. I have been asked to provide documentation for claims like "Hasan is a Maoist dope" because my editors would not accept a throwaway joke without proof that Hasan might actually be a Maoist. It's not my job to decide who the FP should employ, but I will note that at most publications this would get you fired and probably also get one or more editors fired.