Saturday, March 03, 2007

People who lie when apologizing for having lied...

Andrew Lih, in his recent blog post, exposes Ryan Jordan's worst lie of all. In his apology, Jordan, amongst other things, accused Stacy Schiff of breaching journalistic ethics by offering him compensation. I didn't notice it right away because I'm not a journalist and don't hang around with journalists. But Andrew (who is a journalist, or at least a professor of journalism) did. And he contacted Ms. Schiff, who categorically denies Jordan's allegations. This is actionable libel; by all rights Jordan's apology should be redacted to remove the libel, but he's a known liar anyway, so it's unlikely that anyone will believe it at this point.

That does it, though. At this point Jordan should be banned from all of Wikimedia, permanently. If he is going to lie in an apology for having lied, then there is no hope for him. Lying has apparently become so ingrained to him that he apparently cannot help but do it.

Sorry, Ryan. Get thee behind us all; go find help, you need it. And until you do, stay away. We've had enough of liars here.

4 comments:

  1. Wow, this just keeps getting worse and worse. I don't know what can be done to salvage Essjay at this point. You may be correct; he may have fallen so deeply into the habits of a liar (after doing it for over a year) that he cannot escape.

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  2. There is now substantial evidence that Andrew jumped the gun and that the allegation against Essjay on this subissue is rather unfair. I don't know that it matters at this point, since this claim has been spread over every accessible surface, but I think it's a little ironic that Lih touts journalism ethics while failing in his duty to research sufficiently before widely distributing hurtful accusations.

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  3. Wow, it's amazing that Essjay's defenders are trying to put some spin on his lie about being offered compensation.

    Either Essjay was offered compensation or he was not.

    Do you have hard evidence that Schiff was lying, when she called Essjay's claim of turning down compensation "complete nonsense"?

    If it comes down to Schiff's word vs Essjay's word, are you really asking us to believe Essjay?

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  4. I remember questioning Essjay about candidates for the Board having to bear all expenses associated with the position and his answer was totally unsatisfactory (as he was wrong in the original assertion).

    Wonders never cease. And just 24 years old. Still wet behind the ears but everyone seemed to like him and kiss his arse.

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