{"id":233,"date":"2003-04-27T10:13:23","date_gmt":"2003-04-27T14:13:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/2003\/04\/27\/rankism\/"},"modified":"2003-04-27T10:13:23","modified_gmt":"2003-04-27T14:13:23","slug":"rankism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/2003\/04\/27\/rankism\/","title":{"rendered":"Rankism"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

It’s probably real and not a CIA plot (see my blog yesterday about Documents<\/a>), and I shouldn’t be so paranoid myself. But if it’s not a plot, here’s what it actually is: rankism<\/a>. Yesterday, the Toronto Star had a story that their reporter, Mitch Potter, found the documents indicating an al Qaeda-Saddam Hussein link. It wasn’t on google.news, it wasn’t on the UP or AP ticker tapes. Today, it’s on google.news, but when I follow the links, I get to The Sydney Morning Herald in Australia for an article by Inigo Gilmore<\/a>, a reporter for the Daily Telegraph in London. He had worked with Potter, but didn’t find the documents himself. In his article, he says, “Papers found by a journalist….” He doesn’t say, “found by me” (and might I point out that passive voice troubles me). The other links<\/a>, however, including BBC<\/a>, all stated that Gilmore found the documents, and nowhere in these articles is Potter even mentioned. On the Canadian side of the press room, the story is different: Potter found them, Gilmore was tagging along. For Potter’s full account, see today’s Toronto Star article<\/a>. <\/p>\n

I had a similar “grrr” moment when the UBC<\/a> scientists at the Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre<\/a> in Vancouver broke the SARS riddle, while it was non-news in the US media until the CDC in Atlanta caught up. I always thought I was being so petty, but now I have a name for this: rankism, which coincidentally I had just read about in an AlterNet article called, “The Somebody Mystique and the Rise of the Uppity Nobody.” It’s an interview with Robert Fuller, author of Somebodies and Nobodies; Overcoming the Abuse of Rank. Modelling his analysis somewhat on Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, Fuller identifies rankism<\/a>, which is an ism akin to racism, classism, etc., as giving birth to a counter-force he calls the dignitarian movement. It’s appealing, like the Second Superpower<\/a> idea, and here in Canada we finally have a name for the daily BS we put up with from the US. Yes, I know that the American media haven’t had anything to do with this particular story development, but the Brits — Sunday Heralds, Sunday Telegraphs, Daily Telegraphs, and so on — also know a thing or two, particularly in the guise of colonialism, about rankism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s probably real and not a CIA plot (see my blog yesterday about Documents), and I shouldn’t be so paranoid myself. But if it’s not a plot, here’s what it actually is: rankism. Yesterday, the Toronto Star had a story that their reporter, Mitch Potter, found the documents indicating an al Qaeda-Saddam Hussein link. It […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":311,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[600],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-yulelogstories"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/311"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=233"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}