A couple of weeks ago, under the byline 'Rebecca Walker', the Daily Mail ran a piece titled: "How my mother's fanatical views tore us apart." It's a purported first-person account by feminist Rebecca Walker, author of Baby Love and Black, White and Jewish, of growing up as the daughter of Alice Walker. It makes for a depressing read. According to Rebecca, Alice 'despised motherhood' and saw her daughter as a 'millstone', frequently leaving her to struggle alone as a child and confused teenager, and, when Rebecca fell pregnant four years ago, her mother's indifferent response escalated into a horrendous row:

"My mother took umbrage at an interview in which I'd mentioned that my parents didn't protect or look out for me. She sent me an e-mail, threatening to undermine my reputation as a writer ... Devastated, I asked her to apologise and acknowledge how much she'd hurt me over the years with neglect, withholding affection and resenting me for things I had no control over - the fact that I am mixed-race, that I have a wealthy, white, professional father and that I was born at all. But she wouldn't back down. Instead, she wrote me a letter saying that our relationship had been inconsequential for years and that she was no longer interested in being my mother. She even signed the letter with her first name, rather than 'Mom'."

It's a shock to fans of Walker senior to read that their icon could strike her own daughter out of her life, but Rebecca added even more fuel to the flames, transferring her problems with her own mother to the feminist movement in general with this sweeping statement:

"Feminism has betrayed an entire generation of women into childlessness. It is devastating."

And that's when it starts to make sense that this article is running in the Daily Mail, and also, the point when the shit hit the fan. The blogosphere kicked into action. Phyllis Chesler took Walker to task on Salon.com, pointing out that, um, actually second-wave feminism didn't betray an entire generation of women into childlessness and defending Alice:

"The children of greatly talented public figures, as Alice surely is, are often sacrificed to the Great Work. The children can barely breathe in the shadow of -- usually it's the Great Man; in this case, it's the Great Woman. However, great men are allowed every excess and failure; great women are never forgiven for making a single mistake."

Rebecca Walker responded via the Huffington Post and her own website, calling the Daily Mail piece an "inaccurate tabloidization" of an interview, and adding:

"No matter how much she [Chesler] would like to see the piece as factual and however sensational the article may appear, my father is not a descendant of Holocaust survivors, I never used the word fanatical to describe my mother's views, and so on ... She has unwittingly used tabloid sensationalism to make an all too personal assessment of a situation with little bearing on the major national issues we should all be deeply concerned about."

So what happened? We all know the Mail has some kind of mutant Babelfish that they run copy through to produce misogynist spew, but what exactly did they do to this interview, and when Walker says "and so on", what does she mean? To what extent did the Mail distort what she said, and why doesn't she clear it up in more detail on her own website? And how does the Mail get away with it?