The Forward Reports On Book-Banning

Steven I. Weiss has written a piece for the Forward on the Slifkin book-banning. Strangely, he fails to mention the blogs – Chakira, House of Hock, and Hirhurim prominent among them – who broke this story and have done much of the reporting that SIW (the founder of the now-shuttered Protocols blog) heavily relies on for his report.

To understand the development of this ban, see here and here.

Comments

[Steven I. Weiss]

Shmarya - Thanks for linking to my story. I'm not going to try to figure out who "broke" this story, but suffice it to say that I relied on none of those blogs for my reporting, so your assertion is wrong. While I do think that the blogosphere has done an interesting job of collecting information on this matter, I haven't seen much factual discovery that's gone beyond what one can gain from Deiah v'Dibbur and Slifkin's site.
In fact, other than those two sites and my interviews, I think the only other information I used to further my reporting was that fed to me by readers of Canonist.
Of course, I'll be the last person to talk down blogs' contribution to the discussion, and I do think the discussion on the blogs has been very valuable here, but I just don't think that in this case that contribution has been more about reporting than it has been about spreading awareness of the issue and promoting analysis of it.
I'll add one note of criticism, that I'm seeing more and more J-blogs declare their posts to be "breaking news," or declaring themselves to have "broken" a story, when they're simply linking to some other news story or somesuch. This is an abuse of the term. I'm not saying it applies here -- like I said, I'm not going to start that discussion -- but it is an abuse that I've seen with increasing frequency and that should be stopped.
Thanks, again, for linking the story.

[Shmarya]

Point well taken, although Chakira had the story 11 months ago when the banning effort was just getting underway. I'm modeh on the rest, though. Thanks for pointing it out.