When interviews go wrong (or right, depending on your viewpoint), they’re genuine car-crash entertainment.
Sometimes it’s a grandstanding interviewer pulled up short, as Margaret Thatcher famously did, when she demanded that George Negus name the “people [who] say”, or when Jordan Peterson famously humiliated Cathy Newman by refusing to fall for her cheap straw-men. More often, it’s the interview subject who ends up looking a right dill, such as when the then-Victorian premier resorted to petulant silence on Melbourne’s biggest talk-radio show, or when Gene Simmons’s wife deserted him live on-air.
Enter Naomi Wolf.
Wolf is a bit of a strange beast. She once conducted an entire video interview with Steven Crowder, holding her phone over her head as if she was taking an hour-long selfie. But it was a BBC interview that not only made her look like a complete nong, but also cost her a book deal.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has canceled the U.S. publication of a feminist author’s book about gay persecution, months after it was largely debunked during a live radio interview.
In “Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalization of Love,” Naomi Wolf chronicled “how a single English law in 1857” helped stigmatize and criminalize gay relationships, according to the Amazon description.
The only problem is that Wolf’s entire thesis was based around a legal term she didn’t understand.
During a May interview with BBC host Matthew Sweet, Wolf said she found evidence of “several dozen executions” of men accused of having sex with other men. But Sweet pointed out that Wolf was misunderstanding the legal term “death recorded,” explaining that it actually meant the men had been pardoned.
“It was a category that was created in 1823 that allowed judges to abstain from pronouncing a sentence of death on any capital convict whom they considered to be a fit subject for pardon,” he told her. “I don’t think any of the executions you’ve identified here actually happened.”
After a pause, Wolf, who has a doctorate in English literature, responded, “Well, that’s a really important thing to investigate.”
Speaking of important things to investigate: it might have behooved Wolf to actually read reports of the cases she cited. Then she might have noticed that, rather than just anti-gay persecution, the cases involved seriously bad behaviour like paedophile rape.
The on-air revelations provoked widespread derision of the book and its author. Wolf — a former adviser to President Bill Clinton turned prominent critic of President Donald Trump — accepted the backlash with forbearance.
In a post-interview Twitter exchange, Wolf thanked Sweet for highlighting her errors and said she was correcting parts of her book as a result of the discussion.
A spokeswoman for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt said at the time that despite the “unfortunate error,” “we believe the overall thesis of the book ‘Outrages’ still holds.”
Au contraire, Wolf’s thesis was as fatally flawed as the “Time Masheen” in Idiocracy, which relates how “Charlie Chaplin and his evil Nazi regime enslaved Europe and tried to take over the world!”
However, in June, days before “Outrages” was expected to go on sale in the United States, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt postponed the book’s release and recalled copies from retailers. In explaining the unusual and costly move, the publisher said that “new questions have arisen that require more time to explore.”
pluralist.com/naomi-wolf-outrages-canceled-houghton-mifflin-harcourt
Such as, how does a publisher OK such a fatally-flawed book in the first place?