Putters and Journalistic EthicsFollow

Earlier this week, this article went up on Grantland about a fancy new putter. Upon trying the putter and talking with its inventor, the author concluded that it's unclear if the putter is actually any good, and that the inventor had completely fabricated her credentials (descendant of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, graduate degree in aeronautical physics from MIT, worked on the B-2 stealth bomber, etc.).

Also, the inventor was a transgender in "deep stealth" who committed suicide a few months ago. It's unclear, but explicitly or implicitly implied by several other people around the Web, whether or not the investigation that led up to the article, and the fear of being outed upon its publication, drove her to commit suicide. She apparently had attempted suicide once before, and there is an extremely high rate of suicide in the transgender community compared to the general public.

There was some mixed reaction to the original article, then a strong surge of backlash, which culminated in two official response pieces from the site: one independent editorial on the mistakes made in the original article written by a transgender writer for ESPN (which also owns Grantland), and a letter from the editor-in-chief of the site addressing the breakdown in the editorial process.

It's all worth reading, if you have the time.

Edited, Jan 21st 2014 12:19am by Demea

But which locker room should it use?

If we knew nothing about Dr. V sexual identity or preferences, would the investigative piece into the credibility of her putter have been questioned in regards to ethics?

I've never really been in a position where a club needed the use of a locker room, putter or otherwise.

That was just weird, I'm not sure I have much else to add; except maybe that people spend entirely too much money on golf clubs.

I'm quoting myself, as I can better answer myself now that I've read the article(s) more fully.

The journalist Hannan was incredibly thoughtless in his pursuit of the truth. He needn't have published anything about Dr. V's credentials to review the club. He could merely have left them out of claim that they were unverifiable. It seems that the breaking straw for Dr. V was the email sent by Hannan claiming he'd learned the truth about her past.

If that one correspondence had been done with more tact and perhaps reassurances about what would get published or what would be kept secret etc etc. It might have staved off this particular suicide attempt - who knows.

But Dr. V had lied swindled and conned in her new identity. If she wanted her past to remain in the past she shouldn't have lied about her credentials. Eventually someone or another would call her out.

But Dr. V had lied swindled and conned in her new identity. If she wanted her past to remain in the past she shouldn't have lied about her credentials. Eventually someone or another would call her out.

Sure. When they do it for self aggrandizement and money, it smells a little.

...

Well, obviously he was a male since males are better at it.

I honestly am not sure how that is a story.

It really isn't accurate. It's a vague euphemism that doesn't say anything at all.

It would be enough to say, "There is no record of Essay Anne Vanderbilt attending MIT", or whatever claim you're disputing. You don't have to add, "because at that time she was a biological man named Fred Jones", or whatever.

You can dispute her claims without the big reveal.

But, again, it seems like this person was pretty unstable from the start. Understandable, in some ways, but not the fault of the reporter. What WAS his fault, was outing her. That should have been avoidable if he cared to try; from the statement by his editor, it never occurred to him to protect what was obviously a deeply hidden secret.

I'm sure that the point of including that in the article was to highlight the problems inherent in attempting to maintain the "secret" of a sex change. Let's assume for a moment that she did actually have an impressive resume and everything she said about her qualifications was true except that it all happened prior to her operation. She would have had the exact same problems trying to keep the fact that she used to be a man secret, right?

Of course, the flip side is that if we accept/respect someone's desire to keep that past hidden, then we no longer have any means to confirm someone's education, work history, etc. In this specific case, she was more or less trying to use her sex change as a means to conceal her past so that she could lie about it. That's problematic. Despite her claims that she wanted the focus on the putter and not on her, she was the one who kept making wild claims about her own past. Claims which could not possibly be confirmed without learning "the truth" about her sex change. That's on her, not the journalist IMO.


I guess the lesson here is that if you want to have a change like that and you want to keep it secret, you have to actually leave that entire life behind you and start over.

That would be an interesting point, except for the fact that no mention of her trans status was in the article in question. The reporter revealed it over the phone.

And the things that couldn't be verified might as well be lies as well.