NEW YORK (VINnews) — The so-called ‘journalist’ who wrote multiple hit pieces against yeshivas is getting major backlash, after boasting about his coverage and calling it “completely accurate”.
On Monday, Brian Rosenthal tweeted, “Today, NYT Publisher A.G. Sulzberger published an essay about the importance of independent journalism. In it, he cited our coverage of Hasidic schools, which has been criticized by community leaders despite being completely accurate.”
Many outspoken Jews on Twitter were quick to call out Rosenthal’s many false and misleading statements.
“Calling Jews and their institutions money grubbers and quick on the paddle is false, false, false, not just a ‘poor way of portraying us,’” he wrote. “The Times relied on Yaffed’s couple of loud Twitter voices and failed big time. Life is more than Weber and Leifer.”
David Margolin tweeted: “‘Completely accurate’? Brian, maybe in the next installment Mr. Sulzberger will tell us why you lied about sources, granted the head of Yaffed anonymity, invented numbers and conflated various kinds of special ed in order to get to your pre-written story line.”
David Shor tweeted, “Someone is desperately trying to justify years of resources wasted on bigoted and sloppy reporting, that rightly was NOT recognized by the Pulitzer board:”
A May 3 article in the Daily Signal pointed out the many inaccuracies and misleading statements made in the series of hit pieces.
According to the article, the Times granted anonymity to a mother, “on the grounds that ‘openly criticizing Hasidic leaders can lead to being shunned by family and friends,’ ” without disclosing that the same woman left the Chassidic community “and openly criticized it in the pages of the Times, both with an opinion essay and as the lead example in a story published three weeks earlier.”
That mother also directs an organization that criticizes Chassidic schools, which the Times did not disclose.
In one of several other examples in the article, the Times reportedly contacted a yeshivah on Thursday afternoon before Christmas asking for comment from the school on its number of students with disabilities increasing from 12% to 59%. It gave the school until 9 a.m. on Monday, Dec. 26, to comment.
“This made it impossible for the school to contact the Department of Education, which was closed, to try to understand how a third party could review their data and arrive at that statistic,” per the Daily Signal. Although the school says it told the times the correct number is 18%, the Times reported 59%, noting only that the school disputed it, according to the Daily Signal.
“At a time when violence against New York City’s Orthodox Jews has reached record highs, publishing such inflammatory yet poorly sourced accusations against a vulnerable minority group with such reckless abandon should be grounds for immediate expulsion from the Times, not consideration for a Pulitzer,” the publication concluded.
In an extensive issue brief published in March, Ray Domanico, senior fellow and education policy director at the Manhattan Institute, also cited errors in Times’ reporting on Orthodox Jewish schools.
Source: VosIzNeias
