Why does the legacy media keep humiliating itself?

The New York Times's failure to ask basic questions about the story of Woody Brown, a severely autistic man who supposedly wrote a novel, shows again how far it has fallen. And the Times is not alone.

Sometimes the truth is no fun.

On March 30, the New York Times gave the world the inspiring tale of Woody Brown, a 28-year-old California man whose debut novel, “Upward Bound,” captures the lives of autistic people in adult day care. The twist: Brown is himself severely autistic. The novel draws on his own experiences.

Inspiring indeed. In fact, Brown is not merely autistic, he is essentially non-verbal. You might wonder how he wrote his novel.

Good question.

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As the Times and a Today Show interview with Brown and his mother Mary explained, Brown expresses his thoughts through Mary, who actually speaks them.

To figure out what Brown wants to say, Mary holds up a plastic “keyboard.” (It is really an alphabet board whose letters are arranged like a keyboard’s, as it has no working keys.) Brown points toward its letters to spell words.

Here’s what their method looks like in practice:

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(A picture worth a thousand words.)

(SOURCE)

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The method Mary uses to give Brown’s thoughts to the world is a form of what’s called “facilitated communication.” Essentially, caregivers claim they can understand and explain what a severely autistic person is writing, saying, or thinking even if no one else can.

For decades, researchers have tested the accuracy of different variants of facilitated communication, by asking autistic people to repeat words their caregivers have not been given, for example. Unfortunately, the tests nearly always show the caregiver is answering in place of the disabled person, either unconsciously or deliberately.

In 2018, the leading group of speech therapists came out against the keyboard technique.

Outsiders cannot “tell whether the words being spelled out belong to the autistic child— or to their aide,” the group explained. “The aide holding the alphabet board may move the board unintentionally in the direction of the letter that they think the child should select next.”

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The Today Show video shows Mary Brown uses the technique aggressively. She reports her son is “writing” whole words, phrases, and even sentences in seconds.

As skeptics have pointed out, a close review of the letters Woody chooses on the keyboard in the video shows they have essentially nothing in common with the words Mary claims he is saying. Four years ago, another expert on facilitated communication expressed similar concerns about a local news video of Woody and Brown.

But the problem runs even deeper.

Everything about the way Woody Brown “writes” is wrong.

Think about your own writing, whether typing on a keyboard or texting on a phone. You hesitate. You decide on a word or phrase or if you are lucky a whole sentence. You tap it out. You move to your next thought. Your pacing will be erratic.

You may delete and rewrite a word or sentence (the copy-editing errors that pop up too frequently in Unreported Truths usually come from those on-the-fly edits). Sometimes you will miss a key even if you know exactly what you want to say.

Nothing like that happens in the process Brown and his mother share.

He simply pokes at the “keyboard” she holds (unsteadily) in front of him as she speaks the words she claims to see him writing. Brown never appears to be consciously choosing words, much less trying to form sentences or longer thoughts. The pacing of his tapping does not vary. His mother never seems to question about what letter or word he is choosing. He never shows frustration with the way she has translated his “typing.”

The movement of his finger looks like nothing so much as a chicken pecking at dirt.

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Yet, after graduating from a master’s writing program at Columbia University and with highest honors from the University of California at Los Angeles, Brown sold two novels to a major publisher. Upward Bound is the first.

So why should you care?

First, if Brown cannot do this work, pushing him to pretend he can is a form of abuse. The Times article reveals in passing the severity of Brown’s behavioral issues, including his punching out a window in anger — and the fact that even a specialized sleepaway camp sent him home after only a few hours.

He cannot be interviewed for more than 30 minutes at a time, according to his mother. He spends most of those sessions watching Thomas the Tank Engine videos, developmentally appropriate for toddlers and young children. He lives at home with his parents.

In other words, the rest of Woody’s life suggests he is in fact severely developmentally disabled. Which would mean that he belongs and would likely be happiest in, yes, adult day care, not being dragged to graduate school or for television interviews which may be stressful for him.

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(The little engine that could)

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If Brown is in fact incapable of doing this work, his story is tragic.

But that elite institutions have facilitated it are contemptible.

Set the publisher aside. Publishers have demonstrated over and over they will dump editorial standards for books they think may sell well — particularly in the case of novels, which they are not representing as truthful. And Brown (or his family) are paid by and thus benefit directly from the book’s publishing.

The Times, UCLA, and Columbia have no such excuse.

The Times’s obligation is to its readers. It is supposed to give them an approximation of reality, even when that reality is not what they would like to hear: Hiding those problems doesn’t make them less true, it just makes fixing them harder (and hurt the Times’s credibility).

And pretending severely disabled people can communicate clearly when they cannot can be a recipe for disaster. In 2015, the Times itself ran a magazine article about how a therapist raped a disabled patient after claiming he had consented through her “facilitated communication.” (Her rape conviction was later overturned and she pled guilty to a lesser charge.)

I sent Alexandra Alter, who wrote the Times profile of Brown, an email with questions about her work earlier today. She did not respond, or even acknowledge receiving it.

Meanwhile, Columbia and UCLA — both of which consider themselves elite academic institutions — have an obligation to make sure the students they admit are actually doing their own work. Did they?

At both schools, Mary worked with her son from start to finish. I have found nothing in any article suggesting even the most basic independent testing of Brown’s skills. Instead, the Times article explains that at Columbia:

His teachers and classmates quickly adjusted to Woody and his mom’s presence — Mary attended classes as his communication aide — and his tendency to have an iPad playing with the sound on mute.

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(Unreported Truths is never on mute.)

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One wonders what Brown’s classmates really thought about spending over $100,000 a year on tuition and room and board to have Thomas the Tank Engine playing (on mute, of course) as they dissected each other’s brilliant words. Or the fact that he’s the one who wound up with a two-book contract after graduation.

Now that’s a story I’d like to read.

I doubt we’ll get to, though.

Because, ultimately, Woody Brown’s story is — not for the first time, or the last — the story of they way diversity, equity, and inclusion programs have rotted our elite institutions. UCLA, Columbia, and the New York Times are all afraid to judge ability honestly, much less criticize it.

Inspiring fiction belongs in novels.

Reporters should stick to the truth.