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Neil deGrasse Tyson fabrication allegations
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In September 2014, American astrophysicist and television personality Neil deGrasse Tyson was accused of fabricating quotes and anecdotes in his various works and lectures by Sean Davis, writer and co-founder of the Web magazine The Federalist. Initial allegations On September 10, 2014, Tyson was speaking at a conference for Tableau Software in Seattle, Washington. As part of his presentation, Tyson displayed a quote from an unattributed "newspaper headline" which stated "Half the schools in the district are below average." Another slide cited an unnamed "Member of Congress" saying "I've changed my views 360 degrees on that issue." Tyson used these quotes as examples of journalists and others in the public sphere "not understanding data". Sean Davis, a conservative writer and co-founder of the conservative-leaning Web magazine The Federalist, was intrigued by the tweets and did a LexisNexis search for the quotes used by Tyson. Unable to locate sources for the quotes, and feeling that he had found a history of fabrication by Tyson, Response by Tyson Tyson responded to the allegations in the comment section of Davis' original article, stating "one and flavor and context and intent are all key elements to any message I convey—all missing to anyone who was not present at the time." Tyson's identity as the author of this response was confirmed by a spokeswoman from the Hayden Planetarium. George W. Bush anecdote Davis followed up his initial article with another which described other examples of inconsistencies in anecdotes told by Tyson, including a story about the physicist being called for jury duty, in which the details varied with each telling. Ed Driscoll of PJ Media also found that Tyson had repeated an urban legend about NASA spending a million U.S. dollars to develop a "space pen" while the Soviets simply used a pencil. Investigating further, Davis discovered Tyson had been repeatedly claiming that, in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, U.S. President George W. Bush had used the phrase, “Our God is the God who named the stars”. Tyson made this claim to further a point that Bush used the phrase as a method of dividing "we from they" and in a manner devised to divide radical Muslims from Christians and Jews. Davis was unable to locate any source for the claimed Bush quote, though he did find a similar February 2003 statement by Bush in the wake of the Columbia space shuttle disaster, in which Bush quoted the biblical prophet Isaiah and said "The same Creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls we mourn today."
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