This Times ran two Editor's Notes yesterday, the second of which is more interesting:
A front-page article on Jan. 29 about allegations of fraud on eBay referred to complaints that pieces of costume jewelry labeled Weiss, of value to collectors if authentic, were often counterfeit. (The Weiss jewelry company went out of business in 1971.) One buyer said she had had a set of brooches examined by an independent appraiser who judged them fake. The seller was not named in the article, but other details indicated her identity.
In fairness, The Times should have sought her response. The seller, Sabrina Lefler of Draper, Va., who has agreed to be identified, said last week that she had bought the jewelry from various sources, assuming it to be genuine, but noted that her eBay listing of the items had not guaranteed their authenticity. She also said she was not convinced that the pieces appraised as fake were ones she had sold.
The article also referred imprecisely to the lot involved in the transaction. The $360 price was for 58 pieces, including two brooches signed Weiss, not for Weiss-labeled pieces alone. Link
The second:
A book review on Jan. 15 about "Women Who Make the World Worse: And How Their Radical Feminist Assault Is Ruining Our Families, Military, Schools, and Sports," by Kate O'Beirne, repeated a misattribution, contained in the book, of the quotation "All heterosexual intercourse is rape." The quotation, from "Professing Feminism: Education and Indoctrination in Women's Studies," by Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge, is part of those authors' characterization of the views of the late Andrea Dworkin, the feminist writer, and Catharine MacKinnon, the law professor and legal theorist; it is not from MacKinnon's own writings.
The review, however, endorsed the quotation as representative of MacKinnon's expressed opinions, calling it "MacKinnon's (decades-old) contention." In fact, while this and similar statements equating heterosexual intercourse and rape have often been atttributed to MacKinnon, she has long and vigorously denied having made such assertions or that they represent her beliefs.
MacKinnon's past efforts to correct the record on this matter include a letter, written with Dworkin, published in the Book Review on May 7, 1995. The issue has also been the subject of an article in The Chicago Tribune ("Fighting a Lie That Just Won't Die," by Cindy Richards, May 30, 1999) and of an entry on Snopes.com, a Web site that specializes in investigating Internet rumors (www.snopes.com/quotes/mackinno.htm).
MacKinnon traces the origin of her identification with such statements to attempts by ideological opponents to discredit her. Link
