Michelle Goldberg is an American blogger and author. She is a senior correspondent for The American Prospect and a columnist for The Daily Beast, Slate, and The New York Times. She is a former senior writer for The Nation magazine.
Beginning in 2002, Goldberg was for several years a senior writer for the Salon website. For approximately two years, through September 2015, she was senior contributing writer at The Nation. Goldberg's first book, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, was a finalist for the 2007 New York Public Library's Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 2009 she published The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World, which is based on her own reporting about the state of women's reproductive rights across several continents, and explores what she terms the "international battle over reproductive rights". She is a senior correspondent at The American Prospect, and a columnist for The Daily Beast and Slate magazine. Her work has been published in The New Republic, Rolling Stone, and Glamour, and in The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other newspapers. The New York Times named Goldberg as an opinion columnist in September, 2017. In 2012, Goldberg criticized a column written by Ann Romney, wife of politician and businessman Mitt Romney, in USA Today; Romney wrote that there was "no crown more glorious" than the "crown of motherhood." Goldberg responded that such phrases reminded her of "pronatalist propaganda of World War II-era totalitarian regimes." Conservative media outlets criticized Goldberg for the remark; she subsequently said, "I should have realized that right-wingers were going to pretend that I was saying that Romney is akin to two of the century's most murderous tyrants... I'm truly sorry to have given the right a pretext for another tedious spasm of feigned outrage." Goldberg endorsed Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in the run-up for the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Review of ''Blurred Lines''
In the September 17, 2017 issue of The New York Times Book Review, Goldberg published a critical review of Vanessa Grigoriadis's study of college rapeBlurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campus. In the review, Goldberg incorrectly charged that Grigoriadis failed to write about certain Department of Justice statistics on the subject and incorrectly described the author's presentation of statistics from the Rape, Abuse and Incest Network. "This review is factually incorrect from top to bottom," Grigoriadis wrote to Book Review editor Pamela Paul. "Michelle essentially threw together some ideas she gathered during her time at Slate and punched me in the face with them. Michelle is free to dislike my book. She is not free to make demonstrably false statements that not only damage my book but my reputation and credibility as a reporter." The Book Review issued a correction of more than 100 words that read, "A review on Page 11 this weekend about 'Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power and Consent on Campus,' by Vanessa Grigoriadis, refers incorrectly to her reporting on the issues. She does in fact write about Department of Justice statistics that say college-age women are less likely than nonstudent women of the same age to be victims of sexual assault; it is not the case that Grigoriadis was unaware of the department's findings. In addition, the review describes incorrectly Grigoriadis's presentation of statistics from the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network. She showed that there is disagreement over whether the data are sound; it is not the case that she gave the reader 'no reason to believe' the statistics are wrong." Regarding the corrected review, Goldberg stated: "Two things are true here. I made a serious error. And one of the book's major claims about its subject isn't correct." Goldberg also said that she would "give a kidney and five years of my life" to retract her errors and that "This whole thing is turning into a round robin of fuckups." According to Vanity Fair, one Times source called the incident "a significant error," while another described the fallout as "humiliating."
