Cambridge Common: BREAKING: Summers is resigning

Monday, February 20, 2006

BREAKING: Summers is resigning

ORIGINAL POST: I have it from two sources at the Crimson, and it is now on the Adams house list, that Summers is resigning. Apparently the Crimson is leaking like a sieve. Either that or they're floating false information. You know what I know, but it looks like it's all over.

UPDATE: I just spoke to someone in the Crimson newroom who told me that they are in the process of writing the story as we speak and will be publishing it later tonight. The person also told me specifically that it was not a Lampoon Hoax. Again, just reporting what I know.

---

Travis Kavulla wrote this to GOP-Open:

Rumor has it that Larry Summers is resigning.

The Wall Street Journal is supposedly breaking the story tomorrow; The Crimson is looking for confirmation on the story.

From Currier-Wire (via Dems-Talk):

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [CurrierWire] summers resigns
Date: Mon, 20 Feb 2006 22:59:32 -0500
From: Zak Tanjeloff
To:

Yup. I called up a friend at the Crimson and said it's true. They have some legit sources apparently. From my understanding, the reason he is resigning is because the corporation has begun a dialogue with the faculty, something which it usually never does. It seems that the corporation was beginning to mull Summers future and thus, Larry thought it better to resign now then face another vote of no confidence and a potential reaction from the corporation.

Z

Another possibility?

All this is a ploy to make money on in-trade stock. Larry isn't resigning tomorrow, I am sure of that. The stock on in-trade just went up from 72 to 99 dollars a share... and that happened only from the information from a few crimson people and Travis K. This is a classic case of insider trading and someone is going to get busted for it... mark my words, Summers doesn't resign tomorrow and someone makes a lot of money...

Of course, for that to be true Kavulla and Tanjeloff's friend and my sources would all have to be lying, which is possible, but would be kind of sad. I would bet that anonymous commenter is just worried about losing a lot of money, hence the watching the price.

34 Comments:

At 10:38 PM, Anonymous said...: On one hand, I'm rather pleased he's gone. Every indication seems to point towards the fact that he's a tool and the worst kind of leader.

On the other, it scares me to think of how the faculty might take this. I don't like the idea of a strongly politically-motivated faculty being able to dictate policy to the extent it might, and I do like (broadly speaking) the notion of a empowered president able to set a strong agenda, and I did like a good chunk of what he wanted. It's the same reason you don't like it when a petulant 5-year-old gets his way by throwing a temper tantrum.

Either way, it's been quite a ride. Should be a hell of a semester.
At 11:00 PM, Anonymous said...: So is the rumor is that he is going to announce this? Isn't he in Utah skiing right now?
At 11:07 PM, Anonymous said...: I'm stunned. Nice work Golis.
At 11:10 PM, Anonymous said...: you just got linked in the tradesports trading pit.

-vikram
At 11:20 PM, Anonymous said...: The Dept. of Extreme Irony says:
Larry don't live here no mo'.

- Molly
At 11:36 PM, Anonymous said...: All this is a ploy to make money on in-trade stock. Larry isn't resigning tomorrow, I am sure of that. The stock on in-trade just went up from 72 to 99 dollars a share... and that happened only from the information from a few crimson people and Travis K. This is a classic case of insider trading and someone is going to get busted for it... mark my words, Summers doesn't resign tomorrow and someone makes a lot of money...
At 11:48 PM, Anonymous said...: even if it's not true, can he regain power after this sort of crazy uproar? after this sort of "media" riot - wouldnt he have to resign much sooner than not, even if he wasn't planning on it?

it seems like the email world and the blogosphere (this blog included) are making the news here rather than reporting it...
At 11:48 PM, Anonymous said...: What does Wikipedia say?
At 11:50 PM, Anonymous said...: I'm hearing that this is possibly a Lampoon hoax. The Crimson appears to be unable to find the person who broke the story, he won't come forward. A friend at the Wall Street Journal didn't say anything about it when I asked (but who knows what that means?). So I'm not sure if I buy it (yet)...
At 12:03 AM, Anonymous said...: clearly, the Lampoon hoax is all the people *pretending* that this is a Lampoon hoax...
At 12:08 AM, wannatakethisoutside said...: Congrats to Cambridge Common for holding up to heavy blog traffic.

Nice bandwith.

This geek gives you points.
At 12:10 AM, Anonymous said...: This chart is pretty weird, shows what could be evidence of insidertrading?
At 12:14 AM, Anonymous said...: The chart has the leak after 1 am and, well, it's still before 1 am now.
At 12:24 AM, Anonymous said...: The chart's time is not EST.
At 12:26 AM, Anonymous said...: AFter the uproar over his perfectly correct remarks about the difference between men and women in the sciences, Summers kissed ass obsequiously .... and he is getting the boot anyway.
At 12:34 AM, Anonymous said...: Does anyone find it peculiar that this announcement came out on Presidents' Day? SOmeone brought this up on the house list, and it seems suspicious.
At 12:37 AM, Anonymous said...: The Crimson looks kinda empty, either they are not doing the story for tomorrow's paper or they are off-site talking about it.
At 12:41 AM, Anonymous said...: I'm tellin ya, it's all BS. I posted the comment about this being a hoax to make money on in-trade... and I still think that. All indicators say it is. So what if Jack McCambridge thinks it’s legit... since when did we believe anything old jacko said?
At 12:44 AM, Anonymous said...: Newstalk: "crimeds never should have spoken to outside sources - especially not Andrew F-ing Golis."

Good work man.
At 12:45 AM, Anonymous said...: “Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.”

Good riddance. Another sacrifice to the god of elitist liberalism.
At 12:46 AM, Anonymous said...: Isn't Andrew Golis on the Crimson?
At 12:48 AM, andrew golis said...: Andrew Golis is not.
At 12:51 AM, Anonymous said...: so won't we know who this leak is when we see the byline of the article in tomorrow's crimson?
At 12:52 AM, Anonymous said...: I thought the leak was at WSJ?
At 12:55 AM, Anonymous said...: s: you don't know anything about how the Crimson works, obviously. A leak could've been from many, many people -- most likely an inactive editor still on the relevant e-mail lists, etc, etc.
At 1:16 AM, Anonymous said...: Two possibilities for this. One: the rumors are true, in which case this is a historic moment. Think about it. If these are valid, a student-run blog (blogs, if I somewhat speciously include my beloved Dem Apples) have just scooped EVERY NEWS ORGANIZATION IN AMERICA.

Two: It's Lampoon/InTrade/monumental coincidence. In which case, we all have egg on our faces - and a ton of new traffic.

So, win-win.
At 1:18 AM, Anonymous said...: "they" could also mean the entire Crimson.
At 1:18 AM, Anonymous said...: anon @ 12:55,
true, I don't know how the crimson works (gasp!), which is why I framed my remark as a question. also, I was actually going off of the wording in the CC post itself, in which Andrew wrote that:

"just spoke to someone in the Crimson newroom who told me that they are in the process of writing the story as we speak and will be publishing it later tonight. "

meaning that, presumably, the WRITER of tomorrow's article was (among the many) who had leaked to Andrew.
At 1:21 AM, Anonymous said...: Markus: that's a little self-important, don't you think? Blogs "scooped EVERY NEWS ORGANIZATION IN AMERICA"? Don't you mean, a bunch of reporters did a lot of hard work to gather news, and then bloggers got that info sent to them? I'm always grateful for info, but claiming any kind of original work on your part seems a little unseemly.
At 1:29 AM, Anonymous said...: s: i take 'they' to be refering to the Crimson as a whole, and not to the individual author. "they" is not appropriate for use as a singular pronoun, after all; one would have say, "...who told me that he [or she] is writing..." As long as we're parsing things at this level of Crimson-ology, we might as well get real fine-grained about it.

- anon @ 12:55, being a little jerk-y
At 1:40 AM, Anonymous said...: anon @ 12:55, being a little jerk-y,

let's really give all these readers some entertainment. so here goes:

I parsed the "they" differently, though, I see your point. I had read it (without really stopping to consider alternatives) that the "they" was a feeble pronoun refering to the feeble antecedent of the "someone in the newsroom". I figured that the gender was being protected by the lazy "they" pronoun, and so was actually refering to the actual writer.

-s, being even more fine-grained about it
At 2:25 AM, Anonymous said...: anonymous 1:21: Yes, it's extremely self-important. In fact it's unreasonably self-important. That's a hallmark of the blog style.

Besides, think back to 1998. Everyone said that Matt Drudge "broke" the Lewinsky story - if I remember correctly, all he did was report that Newsweek was planning a story. Didn't matter: the Internet had it first, and the old media were irrelevant. That's the key.
At 2:35 AM, Anonymous said...: markus: so, to clarify, this -- assuming the rumors are true -- is "a historic moment" because...it's just like something that happened 8 years ago? And "the key" is...to be purposefully ignorant of how news is actually gathered?

hmm.

- anonymous 1:21, also being jerk-y
At 3:20 AM, Anonymous said...: "Didn't matter: the Internet had it first, and the old media were irrelevant. That's the key."

You can concede that it's true that Drudge got the credit without necessarily thinking it's a good thing, or that old media was entirely useless in the affair. For all the talk of blogs "breaking" this Summers story, none of them have done more than report rumors they've heard from friends of theirs on the Crimson/NYT/WSJ, or copying emails from open-lists. Further, none of them have actually bothered to confirm on their own whether or not there's any truth to any of this before publishing it.

If Summers actually is resigning, then the only reason any of us know about it is because of the Crimson's (or other major media outlet's) reporting, which was leaked to various blogs and open-lists. Without such reporting, published or not, we'd have heard about it from a Larry Summers's press release.

If Summers isn't resigning, and this is a Tradesports scam / Lampoon prank / other scheme, then blogs "broke" a false story while the Crimson was concerned with little details like whether or not the story was true. And the tabloid-like defense of "well, even if it wasn't true, at least we got a lot of readers out of it" is a phenomenally worrisome approach to the dissemination of factual information.

Whether or not it's true, blogs should consider how long they want to hide behind the defense of "I'm just reporting what I know" or "this is just a rumor I thought I'd share" when facilitating the spread of an explosive story across the entire campus and nation. Blogs get to set their own standards, and those standards will presumably fall somewhere on the vast spectrum between the responsibilities of repeating something to some friends in the dining hall and of writing a front-page news piece for the Crimson; blogs that hope to attract large readerships and some degree of legitimacy should strive for the latter, higher standard when publishing hard news.

I've been a fan of blogs for years - I built the first Dem Apples site about two years ago, and I'm proud of both iterations of Team Zebra - but this is getting a little ridiculous. Traditional journalism, with its practices of accountability, careful sourcing, and thorough review, is a vital practice in free societies; before celebrating/attempting to bring about its imminent demise by mocking it, undermining it, and "scooping" it by publishing unverified information, we should ask ourselves what kind of media climate, exactly, we are trying to create.

(I could go on, but I've really gotta get some sleep. Take a look at former right-wing journalist/hack David Brock's "The Republican Noise Machine." Also, this New Republic piece is worth a read. In short, replacing the standards of objective media, based on recognizing established facts, with a media world in which everything is reduced to opinion, debate, and discussion (think Crossfire) is ultimately counterproductive if our goals have anything to do with government and corporate accountability, reality-based government programs and policies, or accuracy in understanding the truth and lies about candidates running for public office - none of which need to be partisan issues.)

Cambridge Common

Monday, February 20, 2006

BREAKING: Summers is resigning

34 Comments:

recent posts