What's It All About Then

I know I'm getting old when I'm hitting the, "well, children, there's nothing new under the sun" phase of life, but the stuff Shalit was peddling in the 90s (and she was just part of a particular zeitgeist, not its leader), is just the same as the "WOKE CANCEL CULTURE" stuff being peddled now. Racism justified with bullshit and wrapped with a ribbon of supposed respectability.

But Shalit did find time to make more trouble for herself, charging that Post media reporter Howard Kurtz "misquoted" her in a piece he wrote on the brouhaha on September 21.

Kurtz quoted Shalit as saying that "the ethos of diversity is ultimately on a collision course with the ethos of newspapering." Shalit told the Phoenix that she spoke of "sensitivity" rather than "diversity," adding, "That makes a big difference."

Kurtz reacted with outrage.

"I would respond to that by saying that is a blatant lie," he said. "I can't believe she's telling you that." Kurtz said Shalit left him a voice-mail message after his piece had already gone to press, in which she said she wished she'd used the phrase "ethos of sensitivity."

To support his defense, Kurtz produced the transcript of a CNN program on which both he and Shalit appeared. According to the transcript, host Bernard Kalb read the quote back to Shalit, and Shalit responded that "what I really meant by that was that the ethos of diversity, meaning really the ethos of sensitivity: offend no one."