Full disclosure: I started a thread about that article on another forum.
David Fahrenthold Retweeted
A deeper look at that story on niche sports in The Atlantic by Ruth Shalit Barrett:
Opinions
The Atlantic’s troubled niche-sports story
Opinion by
Erik Wemple
Media critic
Oct. 30, 2020 at 3:04 p.m. EDT
Readers of the Atlantic may well believe that fencing is the goriest of sports. Over a couple of paragraphs in a recent story on niche sports and college athletics, Ruth S. Barrett writes of two injuries sustained last year by a girl from Fairfield County, Conn.:
In Columbus, Ohio, at the junior-fencing nationals with the couple’s two younger girls and son, [the father] reported that their middle daughter, a 12-year-old saber fencer, had been stabbed in the jugular during her first bout. The wound was right next to the carotid artery, and he was withdrawing her from the tournament and flying home.
She’d been hurt before while fencing—on one occasion gashed so deeply in the thigh that blood seeped through her pants—but this was the first time a blade had jabbed her in the throat. It was a Fourth of July massacre.
The Erik Wemple Blog
wrote last week that these counted as freakish events in one of the world’s safest sports. The Atlantic has already issued one correction on the story — a claim about Olympic-size backyard hockey rinks — prompted by this blog’s questions. Now there appear to be yet more problems.
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Erik Wemple
Erik Wemple, The Washington Post's media critic, focuses on the cable-news industry. Before joining The Post, he ran a short-lived and much publicized local online news operation, and for eight years served as editor of Washington City Paper. Follow
https://twitter.com/ErikWempleI have written two pieces on this episode, one about the reemergence of Ruth Shalit Barrett: https://washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/10/24/ruth-shalit-just-wrote-atlantic-would-readers-know-it-byline/ And another about a number of problems with the story:
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