[tnones]

He said them in jest, and the audience didn't react in horror the way the original clickbait said they did, as proven by recordings. It was pure projection and misrepresentation on the author's part, and everyone else listened and believed and ran with it.

It was also false, horrific and libellous, and he did lose his job over it. Just because the stick used to beat people with was misogyny instead of cheese pizza, doesn't make the act of spreading false information any less despicable.

Edit: BTW, the fact that our media is now staffed by people who are utterly unable to separate their subjective experience from objective reality should seriously worry you. It should also make you reconsider anything you've heard about what's going on in culture wars online and offline, because I guarantee you, the people covering it do not have the statistical and digital literacy to accurately gauge the size and nature of things.

[leereeves]

Indeed.

> Well, now that the dust has cleared and the story has faded from the American press, there’s a postscript that amounts to: “Never mind.” It turns out that, just as Hunt has claimed, the 72-year-old scientist’s comments during a luncheon at a science journalism conference in Korea in June were an awkward self-deprecating joke—greeted with laughter (not the reported “stony silence”) by a mostly female audience. The “Tim Hunt, misogynist scientist” narrative has been falling apart piece by piece over the past month; last week, it was finished off by a snippet of audio recorded by a female attendee and made public by The Times. Now, attention should turn to the real scandal: irresponsible journalism magnified by social media frenzy.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/07/22/sexist_...