When Paul Newman died, they said how great he was but they failed to mention he considered himself Jewish (his father was Jewish).
When Helen Suzman, the woman who helped Nelson Mandela died, they said how great she was but they failed to mention she was Jewish.
When Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, Martha Stewart, Randy Cunningham, Gov Edwards, Conrad Black, Senator Keating, Gov Ryan, and Gov Begoivich messed up, no one told me what religion or denomination they were -- because they were not Jewish.
However, when Ivan Boesky or Andrew Fastow or Bernie Madoff committed fraud, almost every article mentioned they were Jewish.
This reminds me of a famous Einstein quote.
In 1921, Albert Einstein presented a paper on his then-infant Theory of Relativity at the Sorbonne, the prestigious French university.
"If I am proved correct," he said, "the Germans will call me a German, the Swiss will call me a Swiss citizen, and the French will call me a great scientist. If relativity is proved wrong, the French will call me a Swiss, the Swiss will call me a German, and the Germans will call me a Jew."
(Sent to me by RA)
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3 comments:
(Third and hopefully final draft!)
The above story has been posted several places on the Word Wide Web and circulated in chain emails. I'm sure the original author was sincere about his impressions of widespread reporting bias. But are the facts correct? Did "they" (whoever "they" is") fail to mention that Newman's father and Suzman were Jewish? Did "almost every article" say that Fastow, Madoff, and Boesky were Jewish"? Did "no one" mention the religion of Ken Lay and the other listed non-Jewish comparables?
Given the vague attributions, it is hard to know what facts to examine to test the claims. So, like the drunk searching for lost keys under the lamppost, I checked what was easy to find.
I did Google searches on each of the following terms, with and without the qualifier '-Jewish -Jew -Semitic -Semitism -Semite'. That qualifier excludes results that contain those words on the page. This is what I found:
Dead "Helen Suzman" -- 52,800 out of 69,300 hits did not mention her religion. 24% did.
Dead "Paul Newman" -- 2,630,000 out of 2,980,000 hits did not mention his Jewish ancestry. 12% did.
Enron "Andrew Fastow" -- 246,000 out of 256,000 hits did not mention his religion. 4% did. That's a much smaller percentage than for Suzman and Newman, the opposite of what the above story would suggest. And 4% is nowhere near "almost every article" as the story claims.
I also searched for the following terms with and without the qualifier '-Baptist':
Enron "Kenneth Lay" -- 826,000 out of 847,000 hits did not mention his Baptist ancestry. 2.5% did. That's a somewhat smaller percentage than for Fastow. But the story's claim that "no one" mentioned it is patently false.
Dead Enron "Kenneth Lay" -- 115,000 out of 121,000 hits did not mention his Baptist ancestry. 5% did. That is actually a little higher percentage than mentioned Fastow's Jewishness. Of course, religion is more often cited in death notices than regular news.
In the case of Bernie Madoff, his religion is relevant because most of his victims were Jewish people and Jewish charities. He used his Jewishness as part of the scam to help earn their trust. Yet only 15% of hits mentioned that he was Jewish--fewer than mentioned that Suzman was Jewish.
Limitations of my method include:
- Google doesn't look at continuation pages of a multi-page article. For example, I easily found examples where Paul Newman's parents' religions were mentioned on page 2 of an article and not noticed by Google.
- Some articles use other words (dies, died, death, passed away, etc.) than what I searched for. But Google usually finds most of those, too. And when I tried a few of them, the statistics were very similar.
- Google searches the World Wide Web, not printed newspapers. But few people these days get their news from newspapers.
- TV and radio reports probably did not mention anyone's religion much (except Madoff's for the reason given above). But that's largely because their reports are so brief.
- I didn't Google all the names in the chain letter.
However, I have presented real data, while the author of the story apparently just made stuff up.
Like many Internet "truths", the above story appears to be unfounded. That is not the fault of the bloggers who reprinted it. But if we are to successfully combat bigotry, we need to be sure that the examples we cite are the valid ones.
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