Experience required
Nir Rosen was hired by the London School of Economics. Rosen is “the free-lance journalist who gained infamy and lost an NYU fellowship after celebrating via Twitter the sexual assault on Lara Logan and wishing the same on Anderson Cooper.”
Mr Rosen was forced to resign in disgrace from New York University last month after making fun of CBS correspondent Lara Logan, who was stripped, beaten up and molested by a baying mob while covering the Egyptian revolution. He admitted his career was ruined after writing a series of comments on Twitter about Ms Logan, saying she was “probably just groped like thousands of other women”.
But this weekend he announced he will start work at the LSE, and is expected to be paid around £50,000.
One LSE source said: “It’s an unbelievable appointment. You’d think these people would have learned their lesson by now, but all they seem to want to do is rehabilitate highly offensive individuals.”
Nick Cohen phoned the LSE press office. He reported their conversation on Facebook:
“Does he have any academic credentials?”
“No but his war reporting experience is condsidered useful.”
“You mean his experience of justifying the rape of women correspondents?”
“I am not going to answer that.” Hangs up.
Rosen has now resigned. You might think Nick did his bit to help; I couldn’t possibly comment.
The only thing better than him resigning would have been not hiring him in the first place.
Thank you Nick Cohen… Though why exactly I feel like giving you a cookie for expressing sentiments that should be taken as a given for a decent human being I’m not quite sure, but here’s a cookie nevertheless lol.
Didn’t LSE receive 9 megapounds from the mysogynistic UAE a few years back? Didn’t it also finally return a “donation”, from Quadaffi’s son, of 300kilopounds recently? Wasn’t a majority of the board of LSE reported as favouring a boycott of Israel (perhaps as a thankyou for the 9million)?
Am I the only one who sees a pattern here?
I guess they’ve come a very long way since the days of Harold Laski!
I recall being disgusted by this guy’s tweet about Logan. He’s a jerk.
Took me some time to figure out what LSE means. For the benefit of those of us who have never heard of the implied previous case of the school hiring disgraced people, perhaps it would have been better to write the name out…?
Oh, sorry – good point. It’s just one of those names like UCLA and NYU in which the initials have practically become the name, so I forgot it would be cryptic. I’ll change it.
How can anybody, even Americans, not know what the LSE is?
It’s Mick Jagger’s alma mater, out of which he dropped after the Rolling Stones became successful and he decided he wasn’t going to need an MBA to make serious money.
Kids these days
Oh, and I meant to add:
No sense of history.
/Hoffman
Why haven’t the people who appointed this man (and endorsed Gaddafi’s son) also been removed? They have shown themselves unfit to govern the morality of their staff and students.Shame on them.
There should be a new international crime of Rape Denial!
Nick Cohen is right to take the assault on Lara Logan seriously, but wrong to dismiss Nir Rosen’s war reporting experience (which is how I take his “you mean his experience justifying rape?” retort). His reporting is impressive and valuable AND does not in anyway mitigate his comments about Ms. Logan’s assault.
Mr. Rosen’s career will rightly suffer because of this, but I don’t think his contributions should be totally brushed off like that because of one horrifying comment. Nor do I think this should end his career, though it should hobble it. I’m not so keen on the idea of writing a public or semi-public person’s career off because they once said something, even something so terrible.
Holy shit.
Good on Nick, who’s on something of a roll at the moment IMO.
He resigned already. Excellent.
<i>Wasn’t a majority of the board of LSE reported as favouring a boycott of Israel (perhaps as a thankyou for the 9million?</i>
I do that and I’d do it for free. Genocide and apartheid is no way to run a county.
HTML fail again… What the heck…
I am not convinced that Nir Rosen’s war reporting is that exemplary. Isnt he a deeply partisan bit player in that bloody awful mess that is the mid-east? A man with a Hezbollah fetish? Arent his dismissive comments about Logan totally unsurprising in view of his unabashed support of theocrats?
A man who admires ‘resistance’ movements, poses with guns and dresses his toddler son in Hezbollah t-shirts… yeah just what the I-P conflict readily attracts – the world’s loser wankers.
I’d actually go out and spend more of my cash on Israeli products if the BDS campaign succeeds. Israel has many faults but genocide and apartheid do not figure in the list.
Then you don’t know what aparthied is. And you don’t understand genocide.
@14; Knock yourself out – as long as your position is not taken based on having received large amounts of cash from arab governments.
MosesZD,
Apartheid is arguable, genocide is not.
@Don:
I remember some years ago (2007-ish) a lot of old ANC persons went to the occupied territories for a study trip. Their comment afterwards: “We never had it that bad”.
Both isn’t very arguable, but a pretty clear-cut case.
I don’t get the impression Israel does either, as it’s certainly not doing a very good job at them.
What’s your opinion on Egypt’s blockade of Palestine btw? Genocide, apartheid, both, neither?
Ophelia,
as a natural scientist, I just probably haven’t heard that acronym often enough, although I have heard of the institution (in particular in connection with the Qaddafi son). I guess it always depends on the circles we are moving in. As another example, I got confused sometimes when Paul Krugman mentioned “UC” on his blog. I know now that he obviously means those dastardly freshwater economists from the University of Chicago, but I always think of the University of California first because I know colleagues from there and have borrowed samples from their botanical collection, but never had anything to do with the other UC…
Jenavir–
You say “just one remark,” but people don’t randomly start advocating rape, mass murder, or other crimes because their tongues slip and they meant to order a grape soda, or the word “not” fell out at the copyedit stage. This isn’t like using the wrong word for something, as if this guy had said “It’s horrible what happened to that girl reporter.”
The problem here isn’t that this guy’s career is damaged: it’s that Roman Polanski’s hasn’t, and neither have his defenders. But “everyone else gets away with advocating rape” isn’t much of a defense.