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When Philadelphia magazine sent a reporter to exurban Pennsylvania, where you had set a number of first-hand anecdotes about life in semi-rural, "red" America, the reporter discovered a list of small inaccuracies and overreaching generalizations. On the one hand, it was extremely petty. On the other, it raises questions about your methodology.
A couple of things. First, if you applied that sort of standard or investigation to any story, you couldn't do anything except straight sociological treatises. You couldn't do any humor, any sort of broad writing. In the Atlantic piece-my red/blue piece that he analyzed-90 percent was straight, and heavily fact-checked by the Atlantic, and most of his examples were drawn from this initial, broad riff I opened the piece with. And in some cases I thought he got things exactly wrong and he knew he got them wrong. I made a joke about there being more book stores in blue America than red America, and he says I got that wrong. But that's just not true.
There were some things where my writing was overly careless. Out of all the facts in that piece, I'm not sure these were the damning ones that any fair-minded person would pull out to analyze that piece. I think he was being picky. But that's the difference between being a Times columnist and not. When you get up to being a Times columnist-especially if you're a conservative-there's just going to be a greater tendency to want to pull you down. So that piece was not written out of any fair investigation of who I am, it was a piece to try to pull me down a peg. And there's just going to be more of that. But that's life. It comes with the territory.
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