Roxanne Shanté shock-horror PhD story
p2pnet news view Music:- “I’m just gonna let it go … What he’s trying to do is trying to get himself known, to get the popular sites to read after him. This is not a $5 billion Ponzi scheme. What would make someone go so hard and heavy at that?”
That’s Lolita Shanté Gooden, better known as Roxanne Shanté, commenting in Lemondrop on a Slate story which ran an item saying Dr Roxanne doesn’t have a PhD, as she’d claimed.
The original story made headlines when the New York Daily News said her doctorate studies had been funded by Warner music.
Slate did a follow-up written by noted (mainly by himself) “copyright/First Amendment/media/entertainment attorney and former journalist” Ben Sheffner (right), as he describes himself in a fulsome bio on his Copyrights & Campaigns blog.
As he revealed in gleeful and salacious detail, Roxanne apparently doesn’t have a PhD degree.
Says Jeff Chang in Can’tStopWon’tStop, “Sheffner published his piece of gotcha journalism, claiming that not only did Warner not have direct contracts with Shante, but that she hadn`t finished her coursework at Marymount Manhattan and never enrolled in Cornell.”
He goes on »»»
“Perhaps most annoying to Sheffner was that ‘the story was endlessly blogged and tweeted, heralded as an example of a heroic triumph by a girl from the projects over her evil record label.’
Commenters around the web have praised the Slate piece as a fine bit of investigative reporting by a disinterested journalist.
Here`s our gotcha: he`s not disinterested, and the investigative reporting wasn`t all that investigative.
With that in mind, and by way of a purely speculative question, was Sheffner put up to the ‘No PhD’ story in the first place by Warner, seriously stung by the story?
And, if that was the case, was Warner behind any of the information he uses in his shock-horror revelations?
Senior Counsel, Content Protection Litigation
In his original, and much shorter, blog bio, Sheffner used to boast a company he worked for had Warner as a client, and it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that he currently has existing high-level connections with, and within, the company.
Be that as it may, it’s a certainty he has other strong corporate music industry links.
Among numerous other windy boasts on his blog, he says he was “Senior Counsel, Content Protection Litigation at Fox and”, “Litigation Counsel at NBC Universal”.
“OK, so Shante didn`t have Warner pay for her education directly — and perhaps we`ll never know if one of the subsidiary labels made such an agreement with her because Pop Art`s contracts were supposedly lost in a flood,” says Chang, going on »»»
Cold Chillin`s file with Warner, according to Sheffner, didn`t have that level of detail. (Makes sense the file might be incomplete â they ended up at odds with each other after the big judgment against Biz Markie over his sampling case.)
Here`s what WB`s counsel wrote to Sheffner: If Cold Chillin` guided this artist`s compensation to education expenses that would certainly be a worthy one. Then Sheffner makes what seems to be his main point right after that: None of the half-dozen music industry sources contacted by Slate for this article had ever heard of a record label making an open-ended commitment to finance an artist`s education. Gotcha!
But what of her education? Sheffner makes a big point of alleging Shante did not receive her Ph.D and is not listed as a practicing doctor. Gotcha again! (Sheffner seems to fetishize this Doctor thing. Maybe he`s sharpening his knives for Dr. Dre next?) But according to her, Shante has received her BA and MA degrees. Her passionate message in her talks to hip-hop youths across the country is about the importance of education. Clearly much more of the story here is begging to be told.
Most importantly, Shante said she attended college under another assumed namenot even her birth namebecause of a domestic violence situation. Sheffner didn`t follow up on, we think, a reasonable, relevant, and obvious lead here. If she was right, he must have known at that point the story might have required real investigative reporting. Yet Slate`s editors didn`t put the brakes on the story even at this point. Instead, the piece ran with Sheffner`s slander that she failed to substantiate such claims.
“So what did we learn here?” – he asks, adding:
“One, Warner Brothers didn`t, but perhaps someone in the industry did fund Shante`s education. Two, Shante may not have a Ph.D.
“We think that`s all pretty thin for a so-called expose.
“Too bad this couldn`t be settled with battle rhymes. We all know who`d win that one.”
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
Lemondrop – Roxanne Responds to the Rumors, September 2, 2009
Slate Roxanne`s Nonexistent Revenge, September 2, 2009
headlines - Warner Music pays for rapper`s PhD, August 44, 2009
New York Daily News Rapper behind `Roxanne`s Revenge` gets Warner Music to pay for Ph.D, August 24, 2009
Can’tStopWon’tStop - Who Gotcha? :: The Story Behind The Story Behind The Roxanne Shante Story, September 3, 2009
Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. It`s really easy!
Subscribe to p2pnet.net | | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php
Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for details.
