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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Sangdeboeuf (talk | contribs) at 04:26, 24 May 2021 (→Radio Times interview: new section). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Merge Peterson interview section?

The following discussion is an archived record of a request for comment. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.
Consensus is merge as proposed. While the initial discussion shows no consensus (after discounting the sockpuppet, "me too", and arguments based on page views), the RFC that followed showed a unanimous view among participants, with no dissenting for nearly 3 months. ~Anachronist (talk) 21:40, 22 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

For the sake of WP:RECENTISM, I'd suggest merging § Jordan Peterson interview into the "Channel 4 News" section under § Career. Viral phenomenon or no, the interview was a brief occurrence in Newman's professional career that shouldn't be given undue WP:WEIGHT by being placed in its own section. To the inevitable remarks of "But it's why she's known", I would ask, how many news articles about Newman herself have appeared in the last month, or anytime since the initial brouhaha? For Newman's career (as opposed to Peterson's), this appears to have been a flash in the pan. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 02:20, 2 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

You've undercut your own argument. The Peterson interview has been given tremendous weight by reliable sources. Marteau (talk) 15:54, 5 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support due to WP:UNDUE WEIGHT. The obsession of Peterson's camp followers with Newman and their desire to bully her doesn't change that. 38.99.190.242 (talk) 20:42, 2 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose exactly because of WEIGHT which shows the interview had extensive coverage by reliable sources. Also, note that the discussion above about the section itself did not finish and reach a consensus. Until then there cannot be any merge.--Miki Filigranski (talk) 14:47, 5 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    • So then The Independent, The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Guardian, and The Varsity are all reliable sources after all? That's odd considering the previous statement (diff) that they were mere churnalism. I don't see how they can be both. However, we are still dealing with the problem of WP:RECENTISM wherein the article gives disproportionate weight to recent sources and is "overburdened with documenting controversy as it happens". —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 17:50, 5 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
      • I advise you to not intentionally misunderstand things trying to piss off other editors if you want that your opinion gets their respect.--Miki Filigranski (talk) 18:20, 5 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
        • Here is the relevant exchange from § Threats redux, above:

          When characterizing the threats, Iqbal reports She even received death threats following her interview with Peterson, and Channel 4 called in security experts., a description echoed by previous news reports mentioned here. In the article, we dilute this claim heavily and use considerably weaker language: ...what he said were social-media abuse and threats directed against her. No source uses language resembling "what he said were threats" (?!), and doing so seems to misrepresent the cited sources. Discussion above has focused more generally on early reports, so it seems highly relevant that articles have continued to characterize the threats as credible months after the initial interview. A shorter description which hews more closely to the sources would be Newman received threats and online abuse following the interview.
          — User:0xF8E8 04:09, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

          We already discussed that and attribution. The articles in question are, as stated by Dig Deeper, churnalism.
          — User:Miki Filigranski 16:05, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

          What exactly am I misunderstanding then? —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 08:19, 6 May 2018 (UTC) (edited 01:54, 8 May 2018 (UTC))[reply]
  • Oppose, very poor argument, weight means perhaps a one-liner in the C4 article and emphasise in her and Peterson's articles. No evidence to support assertion this is a flash in the pan in Newman's career. ♫ RichardWeiss talk contribs 07:29, 6 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. Newman is a professional communicator and interviewing is a large part of her vocation. Interviewing is as much an art as a science, and commentary about her performance in that role is directly applicable to her role as an interviewer and her claim to fame as the face of Channel 4 News. Her performance in this interview has been mentioned numerous times by numerous, highly reliable sources, and commentary about her performance far outweighs commentary for any other specific act she has performed in her role as news presenter and interviewer. As such, the sub heading as it currently stands gives the appropriate amount of weight due in proportion to the coverage the interview has been given, which has been substantial. Marteau (talk) 08:14, 6 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    • We don't consider "commentary" to be reliable sourcing at all. The "commentary" (actually criticism) on the Newman-Peterson interview has come from opinion essays and op-eds, which are not appropriate for BLPs. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 08:24, 6 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
      • Absolutely incorrect. Newman is news presenter, and commentary about her performance in that role, and the quality (or lack of quality) in the performance of that role is completely appropriate in a BLP, as it is with any other presenter or communicator in the public eye. And while I'm at it, I'll amend my assessment of weight for the subsection to include the instance of death threats to her due to the performance of her occupation, and the necessity of her employer to take action, also due to threats coming from the performance of her occupation. All in all, this is a very weighty issue and having a sub heading is completely appropriate given that weight. Marteau (talk) 08:41, 6 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support – I don't find the arguments for retaining particularly strong here, and I think it would be worth considering whether we'll care about any of this in ten years. Pageview stats are a very statistically noisy method of assessing importance, and don't capture events from before 2016 – I don't think we can get "single most notable thing she has ever done" from only that. So, are Marteau's statements that commentary about her performance far outweighs commentary for any other specific act she has performed in her role as news presenter correct? Well, no – Newman's interviews of Tim Farron, just to give one example, were widely reported on and played a significant role in his resignation as party leader. Even the conservative tut-tutting is not unique: there were the usual pieces in National Review and The Spectator, with the editor of Spiked! being so incensed by the Farron interview he called Newman a "gay-friendly Witchfinder-General, fancying herself the interrogator of men’s souls". The trouble is that for television media personalities, "some news coverage and critical op-eds" isn't a defining career event, it's Monday morning. We must remember that both prominence of placement and quantity of text can give undue weight to statements. Keeping with summary style, the most useful configuration for readers seems to be brief mention of the most important interviews, linking to a dedicated section in the interviewee's article. —0xf8e8 (talk) 17:55, 6 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
So, are Marteau's statements that commentary about her performance far outweighs commentary for any other specific act she has performed in her role as news presenter correct? Well, no - Newman's interviews of Tim Farron, just to give one example, were widely reported A google news search on the quoted phrases 'Cathy Newman' 'Jordan Peterson' yields almost four times as many results as 'Cathy Newman' 'Tim Farron' (980 to 257) and Tim Farron has a three year head start. I stand by my statement; it does seem to be the case that the coverage of the Peterson interview far outweighs coverage of any other event in her career. Marteau (talk) 22:50, 7 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
See Wikipedia:Arguments to avoid on discussion pages#Google test. Just presenting the number of results, as opposed to the quality and depth of commentary, is not a particularly fruitful method of discussion. Google News indexes a number of blogs, social media and self-published websites with little to no editorial control. Looking at the queries you present, it's pretty clear this inflates the numbers--on just one page I found Ricochet, a social media website; Patheos, a blog; and Big Think, another blog. When assessing weight, we have to go beyond "many people are talking about this online" and consider how RS assess the importance of the interview. This is why I mention Farron – the interviews were generally cited by the media as a pivotal event in his career, and we consequently devote some space in his article to it. But to judge importance in the interviewer's career from a spate of routine op-eds and blogosphere reactions – numerous as they were in both Farron and Peterson's case – is to treat the encyclopedia as little more than Crossfire writ large. —0xf8e8 (talk) 01:16, 8 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, the Farron interview became a big thing because of the effect on his career, though it had limited interest outside of Europe. In fact, I could not even find any mention of the Farron interview in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, or The New Yorker, whereas those all covered the Peterson interview. That interest in the the Farron interview was concentrated mostly in Europe, while the Peterson interview obtained wider coverage and world-wide interest goes a long way to explain the significant difference in amount of coverage. Marteau (talk) 04:11, 8 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
NYT and WSJ did not "cover" the interview. It was written about by op-ed columnists David Brooks and Peggy Noonan, respectively. Let's not confuse editorial priorities of a paper's news division with pundits' desire to gossip about the latest pop-culture trend. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 09:52, 8 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
You're right. Besides opinion pieces or blogs, Cathy Newman has received exactly zero mentions in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal at all, ever (according to Google). It was only after the Peterson interview that she received any ink in any of those publications in any way other than one passing mention in a blog eight years ago.Marteau (talk) 10:38, 8 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Request for comment

Should the text under Cathy Newman § Jordan Peterson interview be merged into the section on her Channel 4 News career? —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 23:08, 20 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

"Internet meme"

The statement that Newman's phrasing from her interview of Jordan Peterson "became a popular internet meme" in my opinion is inappropriate without support from sources beyond a newspaper editorial and the Claremont Review of Books. Such sources lack the editorial oversight and fact-checking required for statements of fact, especially in a biography of a living person. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 21:13, 24 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia is edited according to editing policy, not my or your personal opinion. Your revert was inappropriate.--Miki Filigranski (talk) 14:58, 25 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Please explain where Wikipedia's editing policy says we must include this content. The policy on Verifiability says that articles should be based on sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy. Neither of the sources offered[1][2] qualify in my opinion. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 22:35, 25 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Where says it "must be included"? There's no such a thing for anything. It depends - it's relevant to the topic, verifiable in the RS, and has WEIGHT. What you're doing is not concern about the fact i.e. content as such, but an appalling questioning of reliable sources reliability, which "lack of editorial oversight ... fact-checking" is your own personal assumption (!). Do you want an attribution? I will partly revert the references without the sentence with which seemingly is an issue. If you don't have anything else more substantial to say I am making a full revert because this discussion is pointless and I'm not going to play along with it as done in previous section's discussion where your endless argumentation about RS in the end was ignored by the administrators, with part of the content you tirelessly rejected being included (David Brooks, in an opinion piece in The New York Times said "she did what a lot of people do in argument these days. Instead of actually listening to Peterson, she just distorted, simplified and restated his views to make them appear offensive and cartoonish."[3]).--Miki Filigranski (talk) 00:30, 26 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
If you're not too "appalled" to read the actual reliable-source guidelines, you might give it a try. WP:RS#News organizations says that Editorial commentary, analysis and opinion pieces, whether written by the editors of the publication (editorials) or outside authors (op-eds) are reliable primary sources for statements attributed to that editor or author, but are rarely reliable for statements of fact.

Any source that says Newman "totally lost her cool" and that she "needled him, hectored and ridiculed him, but worse: she twisted what he said"[1] or describes the interview as a "hilarious publicity boost" and seeks to contrast "reasonable, thoughtful statements" by Peterson with Newman's supposed "stubborn image of him as a misogynistic bigot"[2] is an opinion essay and is a reliable primary source for the author's statements, but not generally reliable for statements of fact. That's true even when some facts are supported by more reliable sources.

The second ref here is not even about Newman (neither is Brooks's essay), so using it in her biography, even with attribution, is a clear case of undue weight. The quoted excerpts included with these refs only serve to overburden the article with poorly-sourced criticism —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 06:00, 26 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

References

  1. ^ a b Overington, Caroline (26 January 2018). "Jordan Peterson interview fallout: It's little wonder men don't know where they stand". The Australian.
  2. ^ a b Ellmers, Glenn (1 August 2018). "The Jordan Peterson Phenomenon". Claremont Review of Books. Vol. XVIII, no. 3.
  3. ^ Brooks, David. "The Jordan Peterson Moment". The New York Times. The New York Times Company. Retrieved 18 May 2018.
I can't find good sources for the meme, but I can find a fair bit of support for David Brooks's views:
So I think we do need to write that, to give an accurate picture. --GRuban (talk) 14:23, 26 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Those are both opinion pieces (The Atlantic is an editorial magazine, not "hard" news). A clue is in the language: "striking", "unfortunate", "pernicious", "curious", "remarkably", etc.. The second one is labeled as a blog post. Neither one mentions Brooks. A media frenzy among the commentariat is not necessarily a matter of encyclopedic record. Both of these sources, and Brooks's column, are primary sources for statements clearly attributed to the author, but not generally reliable otherwise. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 00:59, 27 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Please also note that The Atlantic's Web site does not have the same content or editor as the print magazine. While they do publish magazine feature articles online, that doesn't give every online article the same reliability as the magazine itself. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 12:40, 6 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Brooks essay

I strongly suggest removing the following sentence from the article as putting undue weight on a primary source:

David Brooks, in an opinion piece in The New York Times said "she did what a lot of people do in argument these days. Instead of actually listening to Peterson, she just distorted, simplified and restated his views to make them appear offensive and cartoonish."[1]
  1. ^ Brooks, David. "The Jordan Peterson Moment". The New York Times.

This is textbook case of an article "overburdened with documenting controversy as it happens". Many opinion columns were published following Newman's controversial interview of Peterson; the furore them quickly died down as the writers moved on to the next scandal du jour. That's how they make a living, but such a media frenzy itself does not necessarily constitute a matter of encyclopedic record. Articles, and especially BLPs, rely on reliable, secondary sources; they aren't just collections of sound bites.

What makes Brooks's opinion on Newman's journalistic techniques relevant? RS guidelines give greater weight to "the opinions of specialists and recognized experts". Brooks is neither; he is an (American) cultural commentator who has written, just recently, on topics ranging from nationalism to the Brett Kavanaugh hearings to the Gaza border protests to Vladimir Putin to Mister Rogers. This particular example is a passing reference to the Channel 4 interview in an essay focused on Peterson, not Newman. If Brooks isn't considered an authority on any of these other topics, then why do we treat him like one in Newman's bio? —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 23:42, 29 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

David Brooks is an experienced and even eminent writer and journalist, whose work has appeared in some of the most respected news sources in the English language, including the Wall Street Journal, NPR, Newsweek, and the New York Times (where the piece was published). As such, Brooks is an authority on journalism, which the interview was an example of. Same, tho a lesser degree, for Conor Friedersdorf and the Atlantic, and, to a moderate degree, for Tim Blair and the Daily Telegraph, whose pieces I link to above. These aren't casual partisan wingnuts writing in some website, they are experts in the field, publishing in respected outlets in the field. Their criticism is highly relevant. It is, of course, opinion, but it's hard to have critical evaluation that isn't opinion. --GRuban (talk) 00:06, 30 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Can you substantiate Brooks being a recognized expert with published sources that treat him as such? "Recognized" for RS purposes means recognition by the wider world, not just Wiki editors. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 00:27, 30 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Working 30 years as a published journalist for outlets like the Wall Street Journal, NPR, Newsweek, and the New York Times means he is a widely recognized expert journalist. It's a little bit like saying "what makes the Pope an expert on religion?" --GRuban (talk) 00:38, 30 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
But, OK. We can find some sources for the sky being blue. "David Brooks of The New York Times is a gifted columnist. Among contemporary journalists, he is our Walter Lippmann, the closest thing we have to an establishment-approved public intellectual." The Nation. "David Brooks ... The respected New York Times columnist" The Washington Post. "David Brooks is a nationally respected editorial columnist", Rice University President David Leebron. "Leading journalist and author David Brooks" Skidmore College. "New York Times columnist David Brooks—one of the east coast power corridor’s most read and respected political writers", Forbes. "DAVID BROOKS, as an author, reporter, columnist and commentator, you have distinguished yourself among our foremost public intellectuals." Dartmouth University. --GRuban (talk) 00:46, 30 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
That's all very gratifying to Brooks, no doubt, but it doesn't establish him as an expert on journalism, which is the relevant concern here. And no, I wouldn't consult the Pope, or the Dalai Lama, on Zoroastrianism, for example. Respect and admiration are not the same as being a recognized subject-matter expert. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 02:51, 30 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
They really are when that is what he is being respected and admired for. All those sources aren't praising him for being a great family man, or philanthropist, or skilled at parcheesi. They're praising him for being a writer and journalist. "Leading", "gifted", "nationally respected", "among our foremost". Your saying they can be doing that but not saying that he is an expert at it, just doesn't add up. --GRuban (talk) 14:09, 30 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Callaghan source

I was about to add a brief reference to a description of the Jordan Peterson interview from this article in the Sydney Morning Herald's Good Weekend magazine; however, the author appears to be an associate editor of said magazine. That and the general breezy, opinionated tone makes it hard to tell if this is a piece of news, human-interest reporting, or simply an editorial. The piece isn't even primarily about Newman, so I think we should steer clear of this source. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 05:04, 6 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Use of bad language is it necessary

A question, is it necessary to an understanding of Newman that this quotation from those who abuse her online needs to be included:

> ... abuse ranged from "cunt, bitch, dumb blonde" to "I’m going to find out where you live and execute you."

It seems to me, that the detail adds nothing of substance. The abuse is common and garden abuse and not anything of note in itselfCanterburyUK (talk) 21:10, 15 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

It's of note if published, reliable sources note it, whether or not Wikipedia users think it is. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 23:56, 15 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
The words illustrate the misogyny she was subjected to, and WP:NOTCENSORED.  Kolya Butternut (talk) 01:34, 28 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Radio Times interview

Peterson's Radio Times interview is a primary source for his comments therein. Articles should not give undue weight to primary sources. WP:IMPARTIAL is also a consideration here. Why should we care that Peterson called Newman's story a "victim narrative"? --Sangdeboeuf (talk) 04:26, 24 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

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