The garbage world of blogs, e-mails, and baseless statements circulated as fact

A reader sent me an e-mail with the subject line:

Bialek has a history of filing false sexual harassment claims

I wrote back to her:

_____, the Pat Dollard item you sent me, which is copied from another blogger named Macranger, is garbage. It says that Bialek was fired from her job at NRA because she made a false charge of sexual harassment. But this statement is not sourced. It doesn’t come from NRA or from any named individual or from any document.

Here is the relevant text from Macranger’s blog:

The media is saying that Bialek is a “Tea Party Conservative”, perhaps.

“She was fired from her job, and her boyfriend suggested she contact Cain in hopes he could help her find employment.”.

In this particular incident she was fired for falsely accusing her boss of sexual harassment, a charge denied by co-workers, as well as being pretty much a pain in the ass to work with.

“I remember her as a time-waster, and rabble-rouser. If she didn’t get her way she cried about sexual harassment”. A former co-worker, a female no less, emailed me. “She was trouble with a capital “T”. The fact that she waited 13 years and never said a word not even during Cain’s earlier forays into politics. She only now magically appears because Cain is leading in some polls and proving a threat to Barack Obama?

Ok, sure.

The statement, “In this particular incident [at NRA] she was fired for falsely accusing her boss of sexual harassment,” comes from nowhere. Macranger doesn’t source it. He just says it. Evidently he bases it on the e-mail from Bialek’s unnamed former co-worker. But the former co-worker does not say that Bialek was fired from NRA for making a false sexual harassment charge. She says, “If she didn’t get her way she cried about sexual harassment.” But Macranger forms the false conclusion that Bialek was fired for making a false sexual harassment charge, evidently by combining the fact that Bialek was fired from NRA with the statement from the co-worker that Bialek made up false sexual harassment charges. Then Pat Dollard copies Macranger’s baseless statement, and the notion that Bialek was fired from NRA for making a false sexual harassment charge goes circulating around the Web.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 08, 2011 05:19 PM | Send