Googling reveals that Hunter deButts is a real name borne by real people, astonishing as that sounds. Moreover, one of them evidently served in the Great War (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/8509128/william-hunter-debutts). He married a descendant of Robert E. Lee, but she was not Woodrow Wilson's sister.
Oh, how the mighty have fallen. I never subscribed to Esquire, but back in the day routinely picked up (full price!) issues at Chicago’s Union Station on my way home to the burbs. They always contained worthwhile articles, plus the annual Dubious Achievement Awards (possibly related to Flaming Feculence Awards?) were classic. I’m digressing here, but it’s impossible to forget the February 2001 cover with Monica Bellucci dressed in nothing but Iranian caviar.
As to The View, I’m still searching for proof anything worthwhile has ever been sourced from that media entity.
I used to tear out the Dubious Achievement Awards each year. At some point, I had perhaps 20 years worth of them in a folder. They were a great window into whatever the ephemeral stories of each year were ... and the captions were spectacular. I read that they kept a big box into which staffers could drop weird news stories throughout the year. Then, they'd all get high and drunk, read the stories one-by-one and think of captions en masse.
Another fine, thought-provoking column. Journalism has a dozen ways to say "we stand by our reporter's story." Which is really just a way to say "our editors were asleep on this one, and we trusted the reputation of the writer. Oops!" There was a time when consumers of news stories trusted the stories because they trusted the editors and fact-checkers. Legacy media outlets insist we continue to trust their stories, but they are proving themselves to be ever less trustworthy. Esquire might be close to trustworthy, but The View not so much. In this case, both have failed the test. Thank you for nailing them, Prof. Graboyes.
Yes it did! And some of the others were even worse. Clearly looked like officers of the Kaiser. I requested the pictures multiple times and finally said, "This one's good enough. I have other things to do."
And thanks to another commenter, I've learned that there is actually a real-life, four- or five-generation line of people named Hunter DeButts here in Virginia. The first one married Robert E. Lee's granddaughter. So far as I can tell, no connections to Woodrow Wilson, no pardons. Makes me wonder why ChatGPT borrowed that particular family's name for its hallucinatory disinformation.
Thank you, Robert for taking the time and having the fortitude to read what Pierce wrote. I have long since given up him and Esquire for my own piece of mind. And several years ago, I carefully hurled the NYT into that trash bin. The latter for its commissions and omissions and my own inability to resist reading the absurd comments by its Westside NYC liberal progressives to the articles.
I knew modern journalism was headed for trouble when Al Gore taught a course at Columbia "off the record" in 2001. And let's not forget the notorious incidents of years past where stories were just made up, they didn't need AI. Jayson Blair being one example.
At the time of the Jayson Blair scandal, Howell Raines commented "The really scary part is that none of the people we printed lies about bothered to call and demand a correction. They just figured that's how newspapers operate so they didn't call. That's scary and that is not a problem with the New York Times. It's a problem with our profession."
The most notorious journalistic failure was Sabrina Rubin Erdely's notorious "A Rape on Campus" in Rolling Stone. Took the word of one unhinged young woman, failed to do even basic due diligence, editors rubber-stamped it, and up-ended the lives of dozens of innocent students. The University of Virginia was in turmoil for months, thanks to its adminsitrations decision to buy the story and run with it. That was back in 2014. Go to her Twitter/X page--which is still up, as forlorn and unattended as the Marie Celeste. The final tweets, from 2014, are Erdely fist-pumping the fact that the Washington Post and other outfits were lionizing her article. Then ... a decade of ghostly silence.
Another wonderful read, delivered with skill. If I had your skill at AI art, I would picture you as a matador driving a quill pen through the back of the charging, frothing bull that Mr. Pierce seems to be.
Here in Virginia, the gentry often go by their middle names--sometimes with the first initial in tow. That seems to be the case with some of the line of William Hunters of the DeButts family. Often, they alternate over the generations. Faulkner wrote extensively about these naming traditions in Mississippi.
We are clearly reaching the point of total disillusionment amidst the vast majority of the public. It’s not only that neither of these writers (hard to call them journalists) accepted their errors with adult-like responsibility; it’s that it’s now likely that tens or hundreds of thousands of people will have seen their initial posts only, and go on to repeat their errors as if true. And if corrected, they, too, will resist the truth. It’s almost as if these “mistakes” know what they are doing — planting untruths almost “virus-like” in the minds of millions.
The test will be if Pierce and Navarro are canned for their carelessness. I know which way I will bet.
As for Neil Bush, he seems to be a less greedy, less drug addled version of Hunter. His career has been one long series of knocking down things, then asking "Excuse, me, can you direct me to the nearest China shop?"
You have a positive genius for the telling tidbit, in this case Lt. Kije. And I alsoloved/was horrified by the account of the court martial of Major deButts.
Sorry, while I’m not one who is a huge fan of the Bushes, Hunter was the high living bagman for the Biden crime family shaking down foreign governments for 10s of millions of dollars for access to the U.S. government.
WTF even *remotely* comparable did Neil Bush ever do?
Ha, a routine reminder and indictment of what mainstream journalism is today.
Call me shameless but I'm not all that bothered by the breaking of rules here. If we were Joe, we'd probably do the same thing, as much as sitting outside the situation I can hand-wring about the sanctity of rules.
Context as to why Hunter was charged in the first place is important. That context is that Joe is the punching-bag for conservatives, and seemingly now Democrats too, who want to buck-pass their failure to understand the electorate and lose the election onto Joe.
I'm quite ignorant of the whole Hunter Biden episode, so take my thoughts as you will. But, if the charges are as minor as they seem; lying about sobriety when buying a gun, tax evasion, etc., basically things routinely done by millions of Americans every year (albeit that's my guess), or otherwise not prosecuted for 90% of people, it's a political application of the justice system.
Does that excuse Hunter's wrongdoing? No. Does it affect the 'rightness' of Joe pardoning his son? Of course - context matters.
And if it's true the guy has struggled with addiction and is now finally on a better path, would you then let your only son spend years of life in prison when you yourself had the power to void that result? Moreover, after an overturned plea deal(?) that would have let him walk anyways?
Political justice, political pardon. Seems about fair to me. Thoughts?
Very well. You are shameless. You ignore the 14,200 other Americans who were charged with firearm-related crimes in 2020 alone but did not get pardons because they aren't the President's son. Maybe you're prepared to approve this double standard of justice but people who went to prison for the same crimes as Hunter Biden's can scarcely afford to.
Googling reveals that Hunter deButts is a real name borne by real people, astonishing as that sounds. Moreover, one of them evidently served in the Great War (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/8509128/william-hunter-debutts). He married a descendant of Robert E. Lee, but she was not Woodrow Wilson's sister.
Wow!
Hunter DeButts! At least it wasn’t Captain Tuttle.
Thanks for a good laugh, Prof!
That's my job!
Oh, how the mighty have fallen. I never subscribed to Esquire, but back in the day routinely picked up (full price!) issues at Chicago’s Union Station on my way home to the burbs. They always contained worthwhile articles, plus the annual Dubious Achievement Awards (possibly related to Flaming Feculence Awards?) were classic. I’m digressing here, but it’s impossible to forget the February 2001 cover with Monica Bellucci dressed in nothing but Iranian caviar.
As to The View, I’m still searching for proof anything worthwhile has ever been sourced from that media entity.
I used to tear out the Dubious Achievement Awards each year. At some point, I had perhaps 20 years worth of them in a folder. They were a great window into whatever the ephemeral stories of each year were ... and the captions were spectacular. I read that they kept a big box into which staffers could drop weird news stories throughout the year. Then, they'd all get high and drunk, read the stories one-by-one and think of captions en masse.
Love your story here! I can picture it.
Another fine, thought-provoking column. Journalism has a dozen ways to say "we stand by our reporter's story." Which is really just a way to say "our editors were asleep on this one, and we trusted the reputation of the writer. Oops!" There was a time when consumers of news stories trusted the stories because they trusted the editors and fact-checkers. Legacy media outlets insist we continue to trust their stories, but they are proving themselves to be ever less trustworthy. Esquire might be close to trustworthy, but The View not so much. In this case, both have failed the test. Thank you for nailing them, Prof. Graboyes.
Fascinating, Bob. It is comforting to know that real journalists like you have our backs. 😊
Working on it!
The AI image of Major deButts made him look more like an Austro-Hungarian officer than an officer of the United States......
Yes it did! And some of the others were even worse. Clearly looked like officers of the Kaiser. I requested the pictures multiple times and finally said, "This one's good enough. I have other things to do."
Priceless. We should free Hunter DeButts - reparations for his ordeal. It’s Dreyfus all over again … 😬
And thanks to another commenter, I've learned that there is actually a real-life, four- or five-generation line of people named Hunter DeButts here in Virginia. The first one married Robert E. Lee's granddaughter. So far as I can tell, no connections to Woodrow Wilson, no pardons. Makes me wonder why ChatGPT borrowed that particular family's name for its hallucinatory disinformation.
There is much that I wonder about concerning ChatGPT, and its ilk.
Thank you, Robert for taking the time and having the fortitude to read what Pierce wrote. I have long since given up him and Esquire for my own piece of mind. And several years ago, I carefully hurled the NYT into that trash bin. The latter for its commissions and omissions and my own inability to resist reading the absurd comments by its Westside NYC liberal progressives to the articles.
Somebody's gotta do it. :)
I knew modern journalism was headed for trouble when Al Gore taught a course at Columbia "off the record" in 2001. And let's not forget the notorious incidents of years past where stories were just made up, they didn't need AI. Jayson Blair being one example.
At the time of the Jayson Blair scandal, Howell Raines commented "The really scary part is that none of the people we printed lies about bothered to call and demand a correction. They just figured that's how newspapers operate so they didn't call. That's scary and that is not a problem with the New York Times. It's a problem with our profession."
Yup.
The most notorious journalistic failure was Sabrina Rubin Erdely's notorious "A Rape on Campus" in Rolling Stone. Took the word of one unhinged young woman, failed to do even basic due diligence, editors rubber-stamped it, and up-ended the lives of dozens of innocent students. The University of Virginia was in turmoil for months, thanks to its adminsitrations decision to buy the story and run with it. That was back in 2014. Go to her Twitter/X page--which is still up, as forlorn and unattended as the Marie Celeste. The final tweets, from 2014, are Erdely fist-pumping the fact that the Washington Post and other outfits were lionizing her article. Then ... a decade of ghostly silence.
Another wonderful read, delivered with skill. If I had your skill at AI art, I would picture you as a matador driving a quill pen through the back of the charging, frothing bull that Mr. Pierce seems to be.
¡Olé!
With a name like deButts, any rational person would dig into it just a bit.
Navarro, on the other hand ...
She was not alerted by the coincidence of first names, either.
Another commenter sent me to this link. :) https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/8509128/william-hunter-debutts
Husband of Robert E. Lee's granddaughter.
Oh! William deButts! Why didn’t you say so?
Here in Virginia, the gentry often go by their middle names--sometimes with the first initial in tow. That seems to be the case with some of the line of William Hunters of the DeButts family. Often, they alternate over the generations. Faulkner wrote extensively about these naming traditions in Mississippi.
Add this tidbit to findagrave"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D._deButts
All the same family. Another was president of Southern Railway. AN impressive lot, apparently.
As I have sort-of quoted before, "It's not the things I don't know that bother me. It's the things I know for certain that just ain't so."
And of course, the mistakes (or lies, as I prefer to call them) will live on forever on social media.
Great article, by the way.
Thanks!
We are clearly reaching the point of total disillusionment amidst the vast majority of the public. It’s not only that neither of these writers (hard to call them journalists) accepted their errors with adult-like responsibility; it’s that it’s now likely that tens or hundreds of thousands of people will have seen their initial posts only, and go on to repeat their errors as if true. And if corrected, they, too, will resist the truth. It’s almost as if these “mistakes” know what they are doing — planting untruths almost “virus-like” in the minds of millions.
The test will be if Pierce and Navarro are canned for their carelessness. I know which way I will bet.
As for Neil Bush, he seems to be a less greedy, less drug addled version of Hunter. His career has been one long series of knocking down things, then asking "Excuse, me, can you direct me to the nearest China shop?"
You have a positive genius for the telling tidbit, in this case Lt. Kije. And I alsoloved/was horrified by the account of the court martial of Major deButts.
Sorry, while I’m not one who is a huge fan of the Bushes, Hunter was the high living bagman for the Biden crime family shaking down foreign governments for 10s of millions of dollars for access to the U.S. government.
WTF even *remotely* comparable did Neil Bush ever do?
It’s sad really that your enlightening article should strike few readers as shocking. Great article. Thank you so much for your excellent work.
Ha, a routine reminder and indictment of what mainstream journalism is today.
Call me shameless but I'm not all that bothered by the breaking of rules here. If we were Joe, we'd probably do the same thing, as much as sitting outside the situation I can hand-wring about the sanctity of rules.
Context as to why Hunter was charged in the first place is important. That context is that Joe is the punching-bag for conservatives, and seemingly now Democrats too, who want to buck-pass their failure to understand the electorate and lose the election onto Joe.
I'm quite ignorant of the whole Hunter Biden episode, so take my thoughts as you will. But, if the charges are as minor as they seem; lying about sobriety when buying a gun, tax evasion, etc., basically things routinely done by millions of Americans every year (albeit that's my guess), or otherwise not prosecuted for 90% of people, it's a political application of the justice system.
Does that excuse Hunter's wrongdoing? No. Does it affect the 'rightness' of Joe pardoning his son? Of course - context matters.
And if it's true the guy has struggled with addiction and is now finally on a better path, would you then let your only son spend years of life in prison when you yourself had the power to void that result? Moreover, after an overturned plea deal(?) that would have let him walk anyways?
Political justice, political pardon. Seems about fair to me. Thoughts?
Very well. You are shameless. You ignore the 14,200 other Americans who were charged with firearm-related crimes in 2020 alone but did not get pardons because they aren't the President's son. Maybe you're prepared to approve this double standard of justice but people who went to prison for the same crimes as Hunter Biden's can scarcely afford to.