July 30th, 2013
An interesting observation from Galley Reader X:
5 commentsSo this is interesting: In a one-week period both Ezra Klein and Annie Lowrey published pieces reporting that Larry Summers’s friends, who want him to replace Bernanke as the Fed Chairman, have started a sexist “whispering campaign” against the other top contender, Janet Yellen.
Neither story actually cites evidence of such a “campaign.” In Ezra’s article, which came out first, his only example was a two-month old quote from Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher. According to Ezra, Fisher said that if Yellen were to get nominated to succeed Bernanke, then the pick would be “driven by gender.”
Now, invoking Fisher as part of a coordinated pro-Summers campaign is pretty absurd in and of itself, because Fisher is a very hot critic of a lot of what Larry Summers stands for.
But what was even better was when Mrs. Klein tried to use the same Fisher quote in her own front-page NYT story a couple days ago: the Times had to quickly issue a correction, bluntly saying that Lowrey (and, implicitly, Klein) had taken the quote out of context:
An article on Friday about Janet L. Yellen and Lawrence H. Summers as possible successors to Ben S. Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve omitted context for a quotation from Richard W. Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. In an interview earlier this year on CNBC, Mr. Fisher said of a potential choice to replace Mr. Bernanke: “It’s a presidential decision, and we’ll see if it is driven by gender or other considerations and so on. Janet is extremely capable. There are other capable people.” He did not say simply that a decision to choose Ms. Yellen would be “driven by gender.”If there’s a “whispering campaign” going on, it’s not between Summers’s anti-Yellen buddies. It’s between the Kleins, and whoever’s urging them to push the Summers’-friends-are-sexist storyline.
