David Aaronovitch and the case of the mistaken Berrys

Blogs by their nature are untrammelled by such details as ‘fact’. While every decent blogger tries to keep things as accurate as possible, evidently errors and inaccuracies – often huge ones – inevitably slip through. Such is the nature of the beast. It is one of the things that differentiates such new media from the established mainstream media who, with their budgets and reputations to protect (notwithstanding the possibility of a lawsuit), are expected to fact-check to the best of their abilities.

But what happens when lazy journalists start copying huge mistakes from blogs and, trying to make a facetious point, don’t even bother to realise the error until the newspaper is in the reader’s hand?

Enter one David Aaronovitch, star columnist for the Times and occasional writer for the Jewish Chronicle. It is in this week’s JC that Aaronovitch concerns himself with the squabble between the General Synod of the Church of England and the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, about the former’s decision to disinvest in Caterpillar – the company that supplies bulldozers to Israel that are used in the destruction of Palestinian homes.

The spat has been written about at large, but what is particularly interesting in Aaronovitch’s essay is his claim that the head of Christian CND, one Neil Berry, is in fact an anti-Semite who has written articles in which he accuses the secular Nick Cohen (amongst others) of having a “Judaic mindset” and that Tony Blair was in fact lifted to Downing Street on the wallets of Jewish backers who willed him to invade Iraq.

Reprehensible stuff, no doubt. And yet today on the blog Harry’s Place, the self-impressed “watercooler” of the “muscular British left” (that curious male-dominated sphere of Iraq war defenders and pro-interventionists), a most interesting post appeared:

We would like to state categorically that the Neil Berry who wrote these articles is not our Treasurer. Neil was horrified to learn of this groundless attack on his integrity, and some of the vitriolic abuse which followed through others' responses to the piece. Whether or not the author of the piece was jumping to incorrect conclusions through a lack of research, or was aware of the error and deliberately aiming to cause damage to Neil and to CCND, we can of course only speculate at this stage. However the author of those articles is pictured here: . Whereas Neil Berry, CCND Treasurer can be seen on page two of the PDF document here and it can be quite clearly seen that they are indeed two different people.

This was part of an email sent to Harry’s Place by the somewhat affronted CCND; the original poster’s response was a genuine one:

It is absolutely clear to me that I made a stupid error and that they are different people. I really ought to apologise to the Christian CND's Neil Berry for this article, and I do. It is a horrid thing to be incorrectly identified as the author of racist material and I'm mortified that I did so. I should and shall be more careful in the future

Which is fair enough, and indeed the original post has been removed. So how on earth did David Aaranovitch make the same mistake? As the Aaronovitch Watch blog notes:

HP is almost certainly Aaro's (uncredited) source because the accusation of anti-Semitism aimed at treasurer Berry hasn't appeared anywhere else that we can find. I suspect that the reason Aaro didn't check it is that he was already aware of journalist Berry who has feuded with Nick Cohen in the last couple of years, and it didn't occur to him that there were two Neil Berries.

So evidently, Aaronovitch has lifted the suggestion that the two Neil Berrys were one and the same verbatim from Harry’s Place, not bothered to remotely check out its accuracy, and then published it in a weekly news magazine. To his credit, Aaronovitch has apologised and removed the article from his website, and presumably a correction will be published in the next issue, but the fact remains that it is a dangerous precedent when a widely read journalist is lifting his sources from blogs that ever-so conveniently fit with his worldview. One can only hope that he’ll learn someday soon how to do a modicum of research for his articles.