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My Naomi Wolf take: it's one thing to make a research error, as we all dread doing, but it's another to make such an elementary, avoidable one. The data came from Old Bailey, which is the same place the radio interviewer got the correct interpretation of the term she misread
It's not like she misread an archaic term. She ignored explanatory information in the same place she got her data, and thus asserted exactly the opposite of what really occurred.
But this is the same person who claimed ISIS execution videos were staged, and that the military was going to use Ebola to take over the country. This is not a person who makes innocent research mistakes; she is simply uninterested in any evidence that doesn't confirm her theory.
If we're looking for the cautionary tale for scholars, that's where it lies: we all enter our research with hypotheses about what answers we'll find. But we have to be ready to modify or reject those hypotheses when we find evidence that warrants us doing so.
It's happened to me before. The groundbreaking point I thought I was going to be able to make ended up being undermined the more archival work I did. Man, it sucked. I had to completely reframe my project, and ultimately it fizzled out. But those are the breaks.
