That’s a fair point. What I had meant to say was that Manjoo’s history of questionable articles (which, to be fair, are just a few selections from a very long and generally liked career) did not seem directly relevant to whether he is being misleading now, other than to imply that he is generally a poor pundit/writer. But you’re right that the argument refers to his work as evidence and not to Manjoo himself.
>history of questionable articles [...] did not seem directly relevant to whether he is being misleading now
I believe the point being made was that his use of social media could have been the cause of this. The implication was that the perceived decline in quality of the output and the ever-increasing use of social media were correlated:
>Manjoo’s latest column seems to be of a piece with these earlier works. After trying, and failing, to get him to own up to the fact that his assertion that he had “unplugged” from social media was not true, I asked him whether perhaps his use of social media was messing with his own self-perception. He didn’t respond to that question.
We can argue about the validity of such assumptions, but, nevertheless, the author of the article was trying to build a case here.
reply