Reporter On The Roxanne Shante Story Chimes In... Sorta

from the well,-well dept

So, yesterday, we published our report noting that the NY Daily News story about Roxanne Shante supposedly earning a PhD from Cornell didn't appear to be fact checked at all, and in checking the facts, we found that almost none of them checked out. I had contacted the Daily News asking them to put me in touch with the reporter on the story, Walter Dawkins, but had not heard back until about an hour ago. Someone claiming to be Dawkins called me (and a call to his phone turned up voicemail claiming to be Dawkins), saying that he heard about me looking into the story from an unidentified "Dan from Cornell" (not from the Daily News, so apparently separate from my request) and wanted to see what I had found out and if there was any more beyond what I had written. So I told him that I had written everything I had found out, but I was more curious in finding out from him if he had done any fact checking at all on the story, and could he back up any of the things in the story that didn't check out.

From there, the call got... weird. First he just started listing off the already debunked sources of the Cornell Magazine (I'm guessing he meant the Cornell Chronicle) and that alum list which was obviously wrong, since it was from '91, well before Shante claimed to have attended Cornell. Then he said he heard about it on a "Hot97 interview." Then there was a pause, and he suddenly got quite agitated, saying he had to "get out of here" and then, "I know what you're doing! No recording, no writing stuff down. Everything I just said is OFF THE RECORD." Of course, that's not how it works. If you have something to tell a reporter "off the record," you establish that first. And I pointed out that surely he, as a professional reporter, knows that. I won't reprint his response, because I guess we can assume that everything after that point in the call was, technically, "off the record" but I can say that he never answered a single question and that most of the rest of the call had him insisting that he had nothing to say to me, followed by me pointing out that he was the one who called me, not the other way around. Eventually, the call ended with him hanging up on me and refusing to answer any of the questions I asked. He did, at one point, promise me an official statement later, but I'm not holding my breath.

Meanwhile, Shante also has been responding oddly, telling one blog that she was just "going to let it go," and posting on Twitter that "in 3days I will rise again everything is temporary today's gossip is tomorrow's deleted messages." Apparently, 'fessing up isn't in the cards.

But, of course, we need those big important newspapers with their professional reporters and fact checkers, or the blogs would run wild with lies, right?

Filed Under: fact checking, roxanne shante, walter dawkins
Companies: ny daily news