Remember the study I mentioned last week, where Dr. Aaron Sell had supposedly claimed blondes are “warrior princesses”? Remember how it was mostly fabricated by the media and has yet to be properly corrected in the outlet that initially fabricated the story? Well, Dr. Sell certainly didn’t. Nor have I. It appears neither of us like to be made fools, though my own self-inflicted foolishness must by necessity be dwarfed by the outrage of having your scholarly name dragged through the mud.
I contacted Dr. Sell upon reading this letter and requested permission to republish it in its entirety in order to correct the record here, as I had also taken their “quotes” of him at face value. He has granted me free leave to do so, and in fact wants the widest dissemination possible — please feel free to republish. If nothing else, this is yellow journalism and must be squelched. One does not fabricate pullquotes for an intentionally sexed-up story from whole cloth, no matter how bad your sales are flagging.
The original paper is available here, and you’ll quickly note if you search it, the word “blonde” does not appear even once. A copy of this paper was included in the following letter to the Times of London.
To: The Editor of the Sunday Times, London
From: Dr. Aaron Sell, University of California, Santa Barbara
Re: Fabrications in Times article
Today the Times published an article, “Blonde women born to be warrior princesses” by John Harlow, purportedly based on my research. Journalistic ethics requires, at a minimum, that you remove from this article all references to me, and to the research I and my collaborators have conducted. This article consists almost entirely of empirical claims and quotes about blonde women that Mr. Harlow fabricated, and then attributed to me. Please take the article offline immediately. Once your investigation is completed, please issue a retraction. I trust that the Times is committed to being accurate, and the clearest measure of this is the speed with which it removes obvious and demonstrable falsehoods. I have appended the research article, so you can see for yourself.
The rest below the fold…
Continue reading “Open letter from Dr. Sell to the Sunday Times of London” →