Erdely’s story was cited by the Columbia Journalism Review in its rundown of “The Worst Journalism of 2014.” Rolling Stone is now being sued by those who were falsely accused.
Last November Lehrer featured Erdley on his show, during which she made her allegations. Within days the story unraveled. A month later Lehrer invited two guests on his show to discuss what had gone wrong with Erdley’s journalism.
“ I feel,” said Lehrer, “we have a special obligation to revisit what may have been wrong with the story because we had her as a guest and we went over details of this and we helped put it out there.”
This half-hearted mea culpa failed to address what had gone wrong with Brian Lehrer’s own journalism in “putting it out there.”
One of Lehrer’s guests, Hannah Rosin of The Atlantic magazine, said that Erdley’s primary flaw was in not speaking to any of the accused to hear their side of the story. (I wrote the lawyers representing the young men suing Rolling Stone to ask if they were including Lehrer in their suit for “helping put this out there,” but had yet to hear back from them when this article went to press.)
“The Brian Lehrer Show,” like Erdley, is an award winner. The program won a Peabody Award in 2007 “for facilitating reasoned conversation about critical issues.”
That is an astonishing citation for a program that routinely denies equal representation to all sides on those “critical issues.”
* * * * *
In November 2014, Lehrer tackled a story concerning Jews, or, to be specific, chassidic Jews.
Back in 2012, New York magazine ran a piece titled “Them and Them,” with a synopsis of the story reading, in large type: “Up in Ramapo, the immigrant community and the growing population of Hassidim had eyed each other with increasing wariness. Then the Orthodox took over the public schools and proceeded to gut them.”
The story was featured on NPR. The New York Times and many other media outlets have covered it. The allegations do not make for pretty reading or listening.
Let me pause here to state clearly that I do not suffer from, if I may invent a phrase, Ortho-chauvinism. I would dearly love to believe that all Orthodox Jews always behave scrupulously. As an Orthodox rabbi, however, I am more than well aware that this is no truer about us than it is about Baptists, Catholics, Buddhists, or any other group. I accept that certain allegations concerning what in England people would refer to as “my lot” may be true. (I should also point out that I am neither a resident of Rockland County nor chassidic.)
In a nutshell, Orthodox Jews won election to the boards of several public schools in Rockland County to which they themselves do not send their children. No one has claimed for one second that by doing so they have done anything that is in any way illegal. As residents of the county, they used the democratic process. They pay taxes in part as a consequence of the policies of these schools and have a right to play a part in managing how they are run. (As a Brit, can I just remind you Americans about your traditional rejection of taxation without representation?)
Also, I was able to discover that staff cuts and other spending reductions occurred in nearby schools where chassidic Jews are not even an afterthought.
Perhaps the investigation by the New York State Board of Regents, which has appointed a fiscal monitor to look into the allegations, will find that the immigrant community’s children, legal and illegal, have indeed been badly treated by the chassidic-dominated school boards.
