Thread by @JeffreyASachs

So here's my question for @conor64: you liken yourself in this piece to the post-9/11 civil libertarians who insisted on telling the truth about the US, come what may. But what if you're not like them? What if you're actually like John DiIulio?

theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

@conor64 DiIulio is the UPenn criminologist who first coined the term "superpredator" in the 1990s to describe juvenile black crime. And the crimes he studied were real. So were the victims. But the *narrative* - that a generation of kids were pathologically violent - was very wrong.

@conor64 Conor doesn't need me to tell him about the catastrophic consequences of DiIulio's mistake, but that's what can happen when a poorly understood phenomenon is conscripted into the Culture War. All the more so when it seemingly confirms a widespread bias about a race or age group.

@conor64 My concern, and the concern of many others as well, is that the journalism on campus free speech today functions in much the same way as the journalism about "superpredators" did in the 1990s, albeit with far lower stakes.

@conor64 And that's where a journalist's "Well, I'm just going to tell the truth" defense doesn't cut it. Sure, go ahead and report on protests and deplatformings, if that's your thing. But the moment you spin them into a narrative, you're assuming an ethical responsibility.

@conor64 Let me rephrase all this in the form of questions. Conor, what (if anything) did John DiIulio and the journalists who spread the superpredator story do wrong? How confident are you that you're not making the same mistake? And is that level of confidence reflected in your work?