Last week the San Francisco Daily Journal ran an article by John Roemer on the Boalt debacle. Roemer's subject was how three bloggers--myself, Stefan Sharkansky, and Jeff Bishop--have responded to media coverage of John Dwyer's resignation in the face of anonymous accusations of sexual harassment from a former Boalt law student. Under the headline "Boalt Sex Scandal Takes a Spiteful Turn on the Internet," Roemer's article offers a factually garbled and conceptually challenged portrait of our respective postings as the "opinionated" ravings of those who are siding with Dwyer against his accuser.

Granted, Roemer most likely did not write the headline for the piece. But the header is an accurate description of the piece nonetheless, which treats the putatively nasty attitude of certain independent web writers as newsworthy while failing to report the real news--that Sharkansky and I discovered and reported the accuser's identity as that of Jennifer Reisch, that we did so because the mainstream media was protecting her rather than investigating her claims and reporting the story objectively, that we were at every point scrupulously clear about our goals and our reasons, and that as such we had used the internet to challenge journalists to do their jobs properly instead of unctuously bowing to the manipulative tactics of political correctness.

Indeed, the most striking thing about Roemer's piece is how it manages to evade the facts and the issues that the bloggers he discusses have made available to him. He notes that we have reported the accuser's identity--but he does not himself report it, nor does he do the legwork to confirm it (though odds are that he, like many other Bay Area reporters, knew very well who the accuser was well before I published her name). Instead, Roemer quotes Jennifer Reisch's lawyer, who attempts to deflect attention from her inability to deny that Jennifer Reisch is indeed the name of her client by descending to ad hominem attack: "These people are vile," she says of Sharkansky, Bishop, and me, as if sticks and stones could change the facts or discredit the care with which we have approached the dubious claims and aims of her case.

The result is that Roemer winds up misrepresenting his own material. Rather than report the truth--that independent bloggers have accurately identified the accuser--he presents the situation as a case of he said/she said in which bloggers make accusations that Reisch's lawyer then denies. The irony here is that the Reisch/Dwyer debacle is a case of he said/she said--it will never be known just what happened between Reisch and Dwyer on that regrettable night in December 2000. That hasn't stopped Reisch and her lawyer, though, nor will it stop Berkeley from tightening its harassment policies and--quite possibly--changing hiring practices at Boalt. Roemer has missed the boat on this one, sacrificing an opportunity to raise the level of debate on the subject of the media's responsibilities in cases of anonymous, possibly defamatory accusation, and settling instead for a noncommittal, ultimately disingenuous approach to the very real issues raised by bloggers who have responsibly reported verifiable facts.

For more on Roemer's piece, check out the eloquent critiques at XRLQ and Shark Blog. My own numerous postings on the Boalt affair can be found by scrolling through Critical Mass' December archive.