There's another recent example where the criteria that Wolf describes in
her article are definitely relevant.

The Claremont Colleges are a group of 10 college campuses located in the
greater Los Angeles area. A lecturer at one of the campuses, known for
her passionate social activism, took the microphone at a campus
anti-hate crime rally, to announce that she herself had just been the
victim of a hate crime - her car had been vandalized. In response, the
Claremont administration shut down all 10 colleges for an entire day in
the middle of mid-terms to engage the entire student body in a series of
anti-hate crime seminars.

Except that it was a hoax. A week after the event, two people who were
friends of a student came forward to report to campus administration and
and campus police, that they both saw the faculty member drive into the
parking lot with her car windows already smashed and racist graffiti
already spray painted on the car. They then watched the woman get out of
her car and puncture her own tires before running off to the rally to
announce that she had just been victimized.

Wolf asks some key questions that are right on point: Was there an
attempt at private resolution? In this case, the purported "victim" did
not walk out to her car, discover the vandalism, and then go straight to
the police. Instead, her first move after "discovering" the vandalism
was to go straight to a rally to make a dramatically emotional public
announcement.

Further, does the account dwell excessively upon the emotions or
psychological state of either the victim or the accused? After the news
of the hoax came out, the woman's lawyer immediately rushed forward to
announce that the suspicion that it was a hoax was having a devastating
effect on her emotional health. He is now frantically negotiating with
the administration to work out a settlement in which his client gets to
just resign and walk away without ever having to admit to anything.

A more general point is, are honest critics excoriated and slandered for
the sin of questioning? This was pretty much the exact attitude of the
activists and politicians who pushed hate crime legislation down
everyone's throats a few years ago. They generally regarded honest
attempts to ask skeptical questions about how such laws would be
implemented as nothing more than cynical attempts to trivialize and
demean the issue. Apparently they simply cannot recognize that it is the
*acutal* hoax, not the skeptical "what if there is a hoax" question,
that *truly* trivializes and demeans the issue of hate crime.

As a result, the politicians did what politicians usually do, which was
to write fuzzy laws that made them feel good about themselves and look
good to their activist constituents, but which left the detectives,
district attorneys, and judges, who have to do the *real* work of
*implementing* the laws, holding the bag with the politically thorny
questions that the politicians just didn't want to deal with.

Yet another argument for having a part-time state legislature. A 50%
timebase would force those clowns to spend a lot less time on things
like raising the tax on twinkies and soda pop, giving 14-year-olds the
right to vote, and passing badly written hate-crime legislation, and to
concentrate on the things that really matter, like passing a budget.