Note: This newsletter was slated for Friday 6/28 but you’re getting it early, since the news cycle caught up with me. We’ll be back to our regular Friday schedule on 7/5.
Just as I was writing last week’s post on media literacy, I received a link to a story in the Washington Free Beacon which describes several of Columbia University’s top brass texting snarky comments to one another while listening to a panel of Jewish speakers discussing the past, present, and future of Jewish life on campus. The text exchange took place at the university’s alumni weekend on May 31.
According to the story:
The event featured the former dean of Columbia Law School, David Schizer, who co-chaired the university's task force on anti-Semitism; the executive director of Columbia's Kraft Center for Jewish Life, Brian Cohen; the school's dean of religious life, Ian Rottenberg; and a rising Columbia junior, Rebecca Massel, who covered the campus protests for the student newspaper. (Links are the Free Beacon’s.)
During the panel, Susan Chang-Kim, the vice dean of Columbia College (the university’s undergraduate division), was busily exchanging text messages with three of her colleagues: Josef Sorett, the dean of Columbia College; Cristen Kromm, the dean of undergraduate student life; and Matthew Patashnick, the associate dean for student and family support. Unbeknownst to her, an alumnus sitting behind her was photographing the text conversation over her shoulder as it unfolded. In the photos that accompany the story, readers can clearly see Chang-Kim’s screen and the other deans identified by name. The story calls out some of the more offensive bits of snark, including this one:
At one point, Kromm used a pair of vomit emojis to refer to an op-ed penned by Columbia's campus rabbi, Yonah Hain, in October 2023. Titled "Sounding the alarm," the op-ed, published in the Spectator, expressed concern about the "normalization of Hamas" that Hain saw on campus.
Journalists have a phrase for a story like this: Interesting, if true.
But was it?
I had reason to be skeptical. The Washington Free Beacon is a right wing publication whose tagline is “Covering the enemies of freedom the way the mainstream media won’t.” The same day they printed the second of their stories on the text messages, one of their top headlines was this one:
Making liberal Jewish billionaire George Soros your bogeyman doesn’t do much to establish your bona fides on the topic of antisemitism, but that wasn’t quite enough for me to dismiss the story entirely. After all, it sure looked like the text message allegations came with receipts.
As I read the story, I had to navigate my own biases. “How do you know if a statement is true?” Daniel Kahneman writes in Thinking Fast and Slow. “If it is strongly linked by logic or association to other beliefs or preferences you hold, or comes from a source you trust and like, you will feel a sense of cognitive ease.”
So here was my first media literacy hurdle: just because I don’t like the source, the slant, or the conclusion of a story, doesn’t mean the underlying facts are false.
And also: just because I, as a Jew, am deeply concerned about the rise of antisemitism on college campuses and the mainstreaming of antisemitic language and tropes, doesn’t mean that the story is true.
Intrigued, I began to investigate further. How could I tell if this was real or not?
Are There Other Sources?
My first step was to use the story’s keywords in a google search, to see if anyone else had covered the story. It was a serious enough allegation that it seemed likely to be picked up by the mainstream press…if true.
There was nothing.
That certainly made it seem like fake news. And yet, the Free Beacon’s story continued to gain traction over the course of the week, at least, according to the Free Beacon. A follow up story quoted from an apology email sent by Dean Josef Sorrett to Columbia’s Board of Visitors (an alumni group) in response to their first text message story. The apology seemed to confirm that the story was real, although Sorrett is quoted as saying that the photographs of the deans’ text conversation were an invasion of their privacy (more on this in a moment) and “not emblematic of the totality of their work."
All of that seemed like a lot to fabricate, even for a conservative news site with little accountability: first a series of over-the-shoulder photos of text messages, then an apology email, and eventually a third story in which the Anonymous Source explained their reason for going public and why they didn’t feel the over-the-shoulder photos were an invasion of privacy. “[T]here is certainly no expectation of privacy when broadcasting one's bigotry in an open forum.” They even included a screen shot of the apology email.
By June 17, Virginia Foxx (R-NC), Chairwoman of the House Education and the Workforce, had gotten involved, demanding that her committee be given the text messages. This, at last, led to a tiny amount of mainstream coverage. By June 20 the three administrators had been placed on administrative leave pending an investigation, at least according to the Free Beacon.
So why wasn’t the story getting more mainstream play?
Not Our Story
Here were some possible explanations, each with its own accompanying narrative:
The story wasn’t seen as newsworthy. The campus protests are over for the summer, the congressional hearings on campus antisemitism are done, and the mainstream media has moved onto other topics. A gotcha story about an ill-advised text message exchange might feel like old news. (Call this “the short attention span narrative.”)
The story didn’t fit a predetermined script. While the right has fully embraced the narrative of campus indoctrination and widespread campus antisemitism, the mainstream press has been more cautious—appropriately, in my view. So perhaps the liberal media wasn’t interested in a story that followed a conservative script. (Call this “the biased media narrative.”)
The story couldn’t be confirmed. Why had Anonymous chosen this outlet over a more mainstream one? It was either because places like The Washington Post, the New York Times, and CNN had turned them down or because they went to the Free Beacon first.
Any mainstream reporter seeking to verify the story would need to talk to Anonymous, verify their presence at the event and inspect the metadata on the photos before going to both the Columbia deans and those on the antisemitism panel for comment. If Anonymous refused to speak with them, or if the Free Beacon had an exclusive arrangement, the story couldn’t go forward without relying on the Free Beacon as the underlying source. Given the website’s right-wing slant, that’s a hard sell for most mainstream papers.
Over the course of the week, I did see some references to the story from more mainstream sources, with Atlantic staff writer and former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum posting about it on X (formerly known as Twitter). But for the most part, the story seemed to be entirely contained within the conservative ecosystem until Saturday, June 22, when the New York Times finally ran a story of its own, citing the Free Beacon as its source. Why did the Times finally run a story? Probably because Columbia’s own actions—placing the three deans on administrative leave—served to confirm the story’s veracity and its newsworthiness.
This gap in coverage is an every day occurence. Plenty of stories we see in the liberal press never make it to the conservative press and vice versa. The news you see depends on the kind of news you seek, and if it feels like the left and right are talking past each other, that’s largely because we are.
How Is The Story Written?
But let’s go back in time, to the period when I was still trying to verify the story’s legitimacy. After searching fruitlessly for other sources, I looked a little deeper at the substance of the piece to determine whether I was being spun. Did the evidence support the headline? Were the texts a “glimpse into administration's attitude toward the plight of Jewish students on campus?” What exactly had been established?
The story highlights the most offensive of the texts, in which Patashnick appears to lean into an antisemitic tropes about calculating and money-grubbing Jews by alleging that Brian Cohen, director of Columbia’s Hillel, "knows exactly what he's doing and how to take full advantage of this moment. Huge fundraising potential." Still, the authors of the story oversell the derogatory nature of the texts somewhat, describing them as “mockery and vitriol.” To my eyes, many of the texts are disrespectful, most of them are defensive, and none of them show much compassion for or interest in the pain of Jewish students. All the same, I wouldn’t describe them as vitriolic.
Still, the basic facts of the story appear to be true, and they seem relevant enough that I can’t disagree with Anonymous’s decision to reveal them. The leaders of a major American university, already under fire for an anti-Jewish campus climate, were clearly unwilling to listen to what Jewish members of the campus community had to say about the situation.
"This is difficult to listen to but I'm trying to keep an open mind to learn about this point of view," Chang-Kim texted Sorett during the panel. "Yup," Sorett replied.
What’s Outside The Frame?
If I were reporting this story, this statement is the one that I would have wanted to investigate: “This is difficult to listen to but I’m trying to keep an open mind.”
Relatable, frankly, even if it’s clear that Chang-Kim failed miserably at the task.
Why was it difficult to listen to? I haven’t reported the story, so I don’t know. But if I was investigating, I’d want to take a peek outside the Free Beacon’s frame and look at the surrounding context. An extraordinarily polarized campus environment. A Republican congressional committee eager to score political points against liberal educational institutions using the college protests as a cudgel. Questions of free speech pitted against questions of student well-being. I’m guessing that each of those Deans has been living through the worst months of their careers and has received a steady torrent of hostility and accusations from donors, alumni, politicians, and outsiders, as well as intense pressure from protesting students.
What I saw in those text messages were administrators who were in a defensive crouch and had lost their ability to listen to the students they were there to serve. I saw people who had been swallowed by a binary narrative of us vs. them. They did not believe that Jewish students felt threatened by the atmosphere on campus , perhaps because believing it would seem to confirm the accusation that they were bad at their jobs. In that context, two hours of testimony wasn’t likely to change their minds.
To me, the deans come across as relatable —who hasn’t texted snarky stuff to their friends and colleagues—but also as failures. The pressure of being under constant fire from the conservative press and Congress is intense, and I am certain that being treated like an enemy makes you more likely to act like one. All the same, their job as Deans is to engage with the experiences of all their students, not just the ones whose politics they agreed with.
To me, the most damning part of the story is that the deans were snark-texting at all, rather than simply listening to the panel. The story—if true—seems to confirm an allegation some Jewish students have made about Columbia’s lack of concern and receptiveness to their experience. Are some pro-Israel Jews amplifying incidents of antisemitism in order to blur the lines between opposition to the Israeli government’s conduct and opposition to Jewish people and Jewish self-determination? Definitely. And are some pro-Palestinian protesters asking Jewish students to choose between their faith and culture, which includes a relationship with Israel and Israelis, and participation in the rest of campus life? Absolutely.
What Do The Sources Say?
So far, everything I did to assess the story was something that any reader could do, if they had the time or inclination. But in the end, I decided to do what a reporter would do. I reached out to both Columbia and the Washington Free Beacon for confirmation. I wanted Columbia’s press office to either confirm the basics of the underlying story or else issue a clear denial. Plus, if there was additional context to the whole situation, I wanted to hear it. You don’t know what’s left out of a story until you ask.
I also contacted the Free Beacon. I wanted to hear how the story was reported and verified, whether any other outlets had tried to confirm it in the week between when the Free Beacon broke the story and when the Times ran its piece, and whether Anonymous was willing to talk to other reporters.
Here, I was at a disadvantage because I was reaching out as a writer with a newsletter, rather than as a reporter for a major outlet. I was honest about why I was interested (a piece on media literacy) and I knew that Columbia’s spokespeople were likely to feel far less urgency about responding to me than they would if I was calling in my capacity as a reporter on assignment.
Plus, I knew that Columbia would be eager to have the story go away, and the Free Beacon would consider me part of the liberal media and unworthy of engaging with. Both were likely to stonewall.
Which they did.
Could It Be Done With AI?
Finally, I thought I’d try a little experiment. Could I reproduce the receipts from the Free Beacon story using AI? I didn’t really think that’s what had happened, but I was curious to see if it could be done.
Here’s the prompt I used:
Create a photograph of someone texting taken from behind them as if looking over their shoulder, but make it so that I can read the text conversation on their screen.
This is what I got from DeepAI:
So, okay. Not persuasive.
Not to say that better fake photos couldn’t be created by someone willing to put more than five minutes of effort into it, but, as I say, I didn’t really think that’s what had happened.
Still, this is one of the questions we will increasingly have to ask of such stories.
With a sigh,
Dashka