Yesterday’s Post ‘Pisses Off’ Alan Schwarz of The New York Times

Today I received the following email, with the subject line “what you don’t know.”

is that all I did — based solely on the public-interest aspect of his message, and long before I was even an employee of the Times – was introduce him to a few people. And they quickly blew him off. He didn’t find a publisher for his book for another 12 months, and completely independent of me.

More importantly, your comparison to Leavitt and Dubner is incorrect, misleading and borderline offensive. (Despite the fact that both of them are friends of mine.) Regardless of how they might have met, those two are collaborators and business partners, and make no bones about it. Your strong implication that Chris and I are either of those two things is something I recommend you correct.

Third, and most serious, your characterization of the Times coverage as “carefully adumbrated” — which, I’m assuming for now that you know, means presented somewhat incompletely in an effort to be vague or misleading. As far as I know your concern with the coverage stems only from your Maroon-connection-to-Riddell-study issue. Even if that were an issue, which I know it is not for reasons of which you are totally unaware, you have some nerve casting the entire work that way.
I kill myself for six months to expose a serious safety problem — and even conspiracy — in youth football, cause sweeping changes (some about to be announced) and investigations by the CPSC and the FTC, and you sit back and decide that one small issue you think you’ve found with it makes it “carefully adumbrated”? Wow.

I am not above criticism. But misinformed and careless criticism pisses me off. When you accomplish one-tenth of the good for the world and kids that I — or for that matter, Chris — have on this subject, then you’ll really have something.

–Alan Schwarz.