In other words, why is your reaction to take Lizza or Smiley at their word when they say that their employer is lying, but not take the employer at its word when it claims that Lizza and Smiley do something that is objectionable? As far as I can tell, you have an action by an employer and a statement by an employee, and are claiming from that that the employer didn't have enough information to act. How can you know that?
How is one supposed to come back from your employer making these kind of statements while you are being investigated?
## Edit: @joshuamorton Can't reply to your comment below so doing it here.
Honest question: We have three threads here where we engage in discourse, and I want to ask you a question from my experience of it. If you have already made up your mind and are not willing to engage with any evidence that shows that you might be wrong, why do you engage in discourse at all?
I see this pattern all over social media and to me it just seems like identity grand standing and a declaration that you believe in the dogma of that identity. Neither helps facilitate a productive discourse.
Your evidence for this is solely a statement from the "accused". I'm not saying that they're lying, but that it is in their best interest to say the exact same thing no matter what the truth is. In other words, without any additional context, a person saying "this negative thing is a lie" is exactly what you'd expect them to say, whether or not it was actually a lie.
So no, if the only evidence for the employer not "looking into both sides and the evidence" is that the person who got fired claimed that, I don't find that alone at all a reliable claim in the absence of any corroboration.
>If you have already made up your mind and are not willing to engage with any evidence that shows that you might be wrong, why do you engage in discourse at all?
This is a strong assumption, and one that is untrue. Just because I find your arguments uncompelling does not mean that I find all arguments uncompelling. I've handed out more than a few deltas on /r/changemyview, so I'm not saying this without some basis in reality.
It appears that you're making a veiled claim that I'm virtue signalling, and I object to that accusation.
If when asking for proof of where employers declared that they believed the women before inspecting all evidence and hearing both sides some very prominent examples of that does not convince you, then I do not know what will.
> It appears that you're making a veiled claim that I'm virtue signalling, and I object to that accusation.
I am pretty straightforward and made that direct claim as I feel like I wasted my time, and I tried to understand where you come from or provoke you to think about it.
I rarely go to this step and I am not sure calling you out is the best course of action, but due to the denial of this direct evidence as well as other experiences in these threads I feel like this is justified and I think this kind of discourse deserve a rebuttal for what it is. I know no other way to call out these rhetorical tricks than brutal honesty. I might be wrong, I am not in your head.
No, you gave examples of employees claiming that about their employers. In a discussion that started with you claiming we shouldn't treat accusations as facts, I would have expected that you could tell the difference.
Edit: My exact point is that in these cases it seems like the employer in question announced that they believed the accuser before looking into both sides and the evidence.
As a disclaimer I don’t know the truth of Smiley’s or Lizza’s cases; I don’t have enough detail to form an opinion. And yet, that in itself seems disturbing. It seems safe to say that few of these men will ever work in journalism again; there is a blacklist, and unless they can conclusively clear themselves, most of their names are on it.
## Lizza in the New Yorker
After what appears to have been a fairly brief investigation, it announced that Lizza was a sexual abuser, but left the rest of us to guess at what sort of abuse might be involved. Lizza, meanwhile, says: “The New Yorker has decided to characterize a respectful relationship with a woman I dated as somehow inappropriate. The New Yorker was unable to cite any company policy that was violated. … This decision, which was made hastily and without a full investigation of the relevant facts, was a terrible mistake”.
## Tavis Smiley of PBS reports a similar experience:
Quote from Tavis: "PBS launched a so-called investigation of me without ever informing me. … Only after being threatened with a lawsuit, did PBS investigators reluctantly agree to interview me for three hours.
If having a consensual relationship with a colleague years ago is the stuff that leads to this kind of public humiliation and personal destruction, heaven help us. The PBS investigators refused to review any of my personal documentation, refused to provide me the names of any accusers, refused to speak to my current staff, and refused to provide me any semblance of due process to defend myself against allegations from unknown sources. Their mind was made up. Almost immediately following the meeting, this story broke in Variety as an “exclusive.” Indeed, I learned more about these allegations reading the Variety story than the PBS investigator shared with me, the accused, in our 3 hour face to face meeting."
## The times star political reporter Glenn Thrush
At the times star political reporter Glenn Thrush is under investigation. Thrush apparently is accused of hitting on younger women who work in his industry, and occasionally at his outlet, though he had no managerial power over them.
Megan McArdle had a couple of opinion pieces that also explain this better than I can here in [1] and [2].
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-12-15/consider-... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-12-18/the-curre...