Today I filed a defamation action — call it a “clickbait defamation” action—against the New York Times.
Here’s the skinny:
In September, I wrote an essay on Medium attacking the scapegoating of Joi Ito by many—including most prominently, Ronan Farrow and MIT—because of wrongs committed by Joi with the knowledge and approval of MIT. To its credit, shortly after the essay was published, MIT openly acknowledged that it had known and approved of Joi’s fundraising from the criminal Epstein. That would—or, in my view, should—have kept the attention of reformers on the institution as well as on the individuals within the institution.
Shortly after MIT acknowledged its complicity, the New York Times published a piece based on an interview conducted shortly after my Medium essay was published. This was the title and lede:
This title and lede are false. Yet I’ve found — in the months since this was published, facing the endless attacks I get in person and online—that the challenge is to focus anyone’s attention enough long to see just why they are plainly false. Offering a tweet-length proof that a perfectly tweetable headline is flatly false is not, it turns out, simple.
