Posts Tagged ‘false tale’
The New Yorker sued by New Guinea tribesmen
Thanks, Rhonda – for a link to the parties in the suit
The profiles of the two legally warring parties could not be further apart.
On the one side are two poor tribesmen living in a remote part of New Guinea; on the other a Pulitzer Prize-winning bestselling author and arguably the world’s most urbane magazine, The New Yorker.
The tribesmen this week filed a $10m lawsuit for defamation in a Manhattan court claiming that Jared Diamond had portrayed them wrongly as vengeful, bloodthirsty killers. The two-page complaint said they were falsely accused of “serious criminal activity and intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress, including murder”…
The contentious New Guinea article is no longer available from the New Yorker’s magazine, presumably for legal reasons, but an abstract still carried by the magazine’s website bills it as a work of anthropology. It explores the story of a New Guinean highlander whose uncle was killed in a battle against a neighbouring clan and who thus felt duty-bound to seek revenge.
The tribesman named in the article is Daniel Wemp, a member of the Handa clan, who is one of the two individuals that have brought the lawsuit. In the New Yorker he is said to have prosecuted his public fight over three years, at the cost of 29 lives in the course of six battles and the theft of 300 pigs.
The other man listed in the legal action is Henep Isum Mandingo, who Wemp is said in the article to have held responsible for his uncle’s murder…
But key elements in the story have been challenged by a self-appointed media monitoring website called stinkyjournalism.org. It claims to have looked into the article, to the lengths of sending three fact-checkers to the highlands of New Guinea to interview the central characters.
Diamond has yet to respond to the allegations.
You mean the readership of The New Yorker in New Guinea is sufficient that neighbors are standing round hollering at these two guys – because of an article by an anthropologist?
Follow-on interviews since the story hit the Web indicate the plaintiffs claim they told the stories to Diamond – but, they weren’t the principals in the tales.
