The New York Times has a story out today about Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh’s old schoolmates tattling on sexual misbehavior, and the FBI’s refusal to talk to any of them in its abbreviated and crudely politicized investigation of him. Here’s the tweet the NYT used to pitch it to readers:
This is what Richard Rorty described twenty years ago as the coming age of “jocular contempt for women” in public life. He was wrong, though, in thinking it would be a fashion of badly-educated Americans reacting against college graduates. You think the person who wrote that headline skipped school?
UPDATE: The NYT deleted the tweet, without apology, claiming it was “poorly phrased.”
We have deleted an earlier tweet to this article that was poorly phrased. https://t.co/wwEm8HHkwT pic.twitter.com/4PJNaWEpfP
— New York Times Opinion (@nytopinion) September 15, 2019
On the contrary, the sentiment contained in the tweet was phrased concisely and unambiguously. It is not the phrasing that was poor.