It’s been said that being a pundit means never having to say you’re sorry. That’s probably more true than not, given that there are few penalties for being spectacularly wrong about the big things.
But that doesn’t mean pundits can’t decide to tell readers that they made a mistake. And that’s exactly what Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen did today (10/22/13).
“The early denunciations of Snowden now seem both over the top and beside the point,” Cohen writes. He should know—he wrote one of them. And now he says his initial reaction was “just plain wrong.”
Cohen’s earlier piece (6/11/13) called Snowden a “self-proclaimed martyr for our civil liberties,” and predicted that he would “go down as a cross-dressing Little Red Riding Hood.” Cohen closed with this:
Everything about Edward Snowden is ridiculously cinematic. He is not paranoiac; he is merely narcissistic. He jettisoned a girlfriend, a career and, undoubtedly, his personal freedom to expose programs that were known to our elected officials and could have been deduced by anyone who has ever Googled anything. History will not record him as “one of America’s most consequential whistleblowers.” History is more likely to forget him.
A few months later, Cohen is telling readers that “my mouth is agape at the sheer size of these data-gathering programs.” Snowden is no longer some cross-dressing martyr; he is “an authentic whistleblower” who might be compared to Paul Revere; he’s even “a bit like John Brown, the zealot who intensely felt the inhumanity of slavery and broke the law in an attempt to end the practice.”
Well, that’s something. Cohen is to be credited for re-evaluating his work, and doing something to clear up the record. Here’s to hoping that some day he might do the same thing about his support for unconstitutional stop-and-frisk police harassment. But in the meantime, this is a remarkable turnaround that deserves to be noted.
Are you sorry about your first line plural, also echoed in FAIR emails?
“It’s been said that being a pundits means never having to say you’re sorry.”
It’s a typo that’s been fixed–lighten up.
This is really remarkable–Cohen genuinely apologized, and he is to be commended for it.
“Cross dressing martyr” sounds like something regurgitated from their masters deep in the NSA. You are all sick and don’t know it
You’d think journalists would know that ad hominem attacks never work when you’re trying to discredit someone.
At least Cohen seems to have come around to what the rest of us knew from the beginning; that Snowden’s revelations are indeed very significant. And based on their ever-increasing size and scope, history WILL remember them.
Added props to Cohen for having the courage to admit he was wrong. It’s a start.
Thank you, Mr. Cohen:
Many people would not correct a mistake.
Orwell was right about many things, especially that Memory Hole. Things like “shock and awe” just keep fading to black and morph into oblivion.
Rewriting history is a fraud, and yet so common, so thank you for being honest about your first impression and then correcting it .I hope that this is a new kind of honesty virus that will also spread to politicians and to CEOs. : )
Does anyone even read Cohen’s work? Its so liberally biased that I use his column for the bottom of my cats litter box
This is a new low for America, discrediting torture allegations before they come out-“Cross dressing Little Red Riding Hood”. We usually lecture other countries ad nauseum for that
To hell with snowden.Glen Beck was spouting this stuff three years ago.But he was crazy