Recollections of My Nonexistence

by Rebecca Solnit

“I spoke with my former professor Ben Bagdikian about the matter today, and he condemned the action as wrong. Bagdikian, former ombudsman for the Washington Post, currently a professor of journalism at UC Berkeley, and a national authority on journalistic ethics, said that although it is customary to circulate unpublished academic writing within academic circles for review, the circumstances here are different: your attack on my book was sent not to impartial authorities but to concerned parties who also happen to be governmental officials, an unheard-of compromise of journalistic independence for writing dealing with social and political issues. A likely effect of such an act is to create pressure on the publishers to withhold publication.” Recruiting a powerful man was, like throwing published data into a conflict, another chess move to compensate for my own lack or sense of lack of credibility in the conflict. And I pointed out to my editor that in raging about my sins of interpretation—and only those sins—this reader had apparently found no factual errors worth mentioning. Credibility is a basic survival tool.