JESSE SINGAL: If You Can’t See That Adam Rubenstein Was Treated Unfairly, You’re Being A Jerk.

What happened to Adam Rubenstein was, in fact, quite bad! At least by the standards of negative outcomes for someone who was in a very privileged position. He’s not a war orphan, but he did experience a pretty harrowing smearing in part because his own colleagues flew entirely off the rails. And if you look at the subset of those colleagues who are tweeting openly about all this, you’re just not seeing much remorse or reflection. Some of them are claiming that it was Rubenstein who did the smearing because of an unconvincing demand for a correction issued on Twitter by Edward Wong, a Times reporter Rubenstein criticized in his piece.1 If you’re worried about smearing, maybe raise your voice a bit when your own outlet is melting down? A lot of this concern for exacting journalistic standards seems sudden and opportunistic — where was it a few years ago?

Many journalists are exhibiting a complete lack of empathy here. I can already hear their rebuttals — something something THERE ARE WARS GOING ON AND CIVILIANS ARE DYING AND YOU’RE WRITING ABOUT A SINGLE JOURNALIST? — but that’s silly. Setting aside the fact that the people making this argument will then turn around and spend half a day ranting about a headline that doesn’t sufficiently bash Donald Trump (even though CHILDREN ARE DYING), there just have to be some standards within the halls of journalism’s most exalted institutions. If the supposed best journalists in the country care this little about the truth, and about fair and accurate reporting, what kind of message does that send?

A truthful one.