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For Journalists, There Are No Consequences
And that’s just how they want it.
Early this morning, a story broke on Bloomberg Law about a Trump administration official from the Department of Labor who reportedly made anti-Semitic remarks on his personal Facebook account. The headline of the piece from reporter Ben Penn asserted: “Trump Labor Aide Quits After Anti-Semitic Facebook Posts Surface.”
SCOOP: Trump Labor Department's new sr adviser Leif Olson posted on Facebook that Jewish media "protect their own." In response to my request for comment on Olson's anti-Semitic post, @USDOL says they've accepted his resignation. https://t.co/68kDvaFn0h
— Ben Penn (@benjaminpenn) September 3, 2019
In context, Olson’s Facebook post is so obviously sarcastic there is no mistaking it for anything but. Liberal and conservative reporters alike took issue with how Olson’s words were portrayed:
“Massive, historic emasculating 70-point victory” is very clearly making fun of Paul Nehlen https://t.co/QyvDJqGLIe
— Jane Coaston (@cjane87) September 3, 2019
It seems extremely obvious that the ostensibly antisemitic comments at issue here were sarcastic, intended to mock antisemitic tropes rather than promote them. https://t.co/L4xCXMrk7C
— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) September 3, 2019
But Bloomberg and the reporter (as of this posting over twelve hours after the piece went online) are standing by the reporting.
I asked a Bloomberg Law spokesperson about that incredibly misleading piece on Leif Olson. Spox says, "We stand behind our reporting." Uh…
— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) September 3, 2019
Olson made a statement on his personal Facebook account, and his friend (and all day online defender Ted Frank reposted it on Twitter:
Leif’s full statement, publicly available on Facebook. Leif’s Target filings are available here: https://t.co/EX7LX0ul5l pic.twitter.com/C8wWDJGXSf
— (((tedfrank))) (@tedfrank) September 3, 2019
Inexplicably, the Trump administration has remained silent on the smear, and the Department of Labor accepted Olson’s resignation (though one has to wonder if they asked for it).
Several weeks ago it was front-page news that Trump officials were keeping track of journalists’ social media postings, with the actions deemed a war on the media by many of the self-proclaimed firefighters in the press. What those in the media don’t seem to understand is anyone involved in such an effort is merely fighting fire with fire. The media have purposefully placed itself in an adversarial role with the Trump administration and anyone who works for it. They have declared war, yet somehow act surprised when the Trump administration responds.
The Olson news comes on the heels of a court decision granting Brian Karem back his press pass after the White House suspended it following an outburst in the Rose Garden:
—@BoutrousTed tells me he's "very pleased" with the court's decision, adding, "The White House’s suspension of his press credentials violated the First Amendment and due process and was a blatant attempt to chill vigorous reporting about the President.” https://t.co/ehUokh0YQk
— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) September 3, 2019
To their credit, the White House Correspondents’ Association didn’t unilaterally cheer the decision,
WHCA president @jonkarl says the organization "is gratified" by the @BrianKarem decision, but adds at end, "As we have said repeatedly, we believe everyone should conduct themselves professionally at the White House." pic.twitter.com/eA4BANrvsD
— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) September 4, 2019
But nevertheless, Karem has his press pass back, and Ben Penn still has a job. For as much as they whine about accountability, for the media themselves, there is none.
Published in General
This honestly seems quite bizarre.
Perhaps it’s best not to use tropes of this kind at all, even to make fun of criticism of neo-cons?
The Trump Admin should start ignoring these idiotic court rulings. No one has a first amendment right to enter the White House. This is ridiculous.
Yes, that’s the ticket. We should use only the pre-approved words. After all, some people are retarded and don’t understand humor.
There is that portrait of our seventh president hanging in the Oval Office…unfortunately, the facts of Jackson’s most obvious precedent are not ones which President Trump would wish to cite.
If people want my sympathy, they should act with some sense.
Member of the press is an evil troll. But trolls win if you give in to them.
FIFY
If the Bloomberg case is not a textbook example of “actual malice” then none exists.
If a Bloomberg reporter screwed up a business story as badly as Penn screwed this one up, he’d be escorted out of the building in about a minute. And that would be the same thing for other reporters at regional news outlets. The problem is inside the Beltway, and at places in New York or elsewhere that focus on or cater to actions inside the Beltway, being wrong no longer is grounds for termination if you’re wrong in the ‘right’ way.
Make an error, even if it’s blatantly a deliberate one due to selective editing of posts or quotes, and your company will stand behind you if the error enhances The Narrative. Legal action and a hefty payout really is the only thing that will force changes to the current policies (but not because the people involved have seen the light and plan to change their ways, but only because they’re restrained and punished by a judge and jury).
Yeah, Sarcasm can get you fired. It may be wrong and unjust that it gets you fired, but it can. Conservatives, Libertarians, and moderates need to be careful with speech that can be twisted or taken out of contest.
You have a better employer than most, Max. Since you are very safe, you are in an awesome spot to criticize the caution of others.
Anything can get you fired, unless you are in a protected class. Anything.
What’s approved today will be heresy tomorrow. The left wants to pass you around like the new prisoner in the block.
It’s best to stick to a pseudonym and not discuss anything under your real name.
That said, if anything bad happens to Penn, I’m going to laugh at his suffering. I hope he gets his private life exposed, and every potentially unwoke thing shouted from the rooftops. The only thing that will stop these scumbags is when they realize it could happen to them.
Kind of shocking that this passes muster, from an editor. Clearly seeking bad things to tar the president.
OK, fine. But take your sissy journalism degrees off the wall and chuck ’em away.
I would not consider the person involved to be a celebrity, but a low level official. People like that should be able to successfully sue members of the press and seek punitive damages.
Perhaps we need a civil tort law similar to the Brits in this case when it comes to the press.
It’s a pity – and impoverishes public discourse by reducing the space for wit, nuance, sarcasm and polemic.
(Leave aside pre-approved words, this can equally be said to apply to pre-approved opinions.)
When ill intent and mud slinging come into it – well.
However.
When the Right engages in exactly the same sort of thing with public figures like Michelle Obama (not proud of being American?!! What heresy is this, I ask?) or Ilhan Omar (hates America?!!! If she floats she’s…) then it has lost (if it ever had) the moral high ground on this. In fact it’s helped create the problem.
Hoisted, dare I say, on one’s own petard.
Doubleplus ungood thoughtcrime.
There is a pretty large mistake in this post.
“Trump officials”. I heard it was Trump allies -which could be anyone with access to a smartphone. I checked the link and even in the headline it says “allies”. In fact the NYTimes calls them a “loose network”.
So this change turns a non-story ( allies of all politicians are doing all kinds of nefarious things-not that outing journalists is nefarious) into a real story.
I’ve seen this happen far too much coming from ‘our side’. At the very least it’s sloppy. Sloppy journalism. You should correct that.
Reading that sarcasm, I can see why they accepted ( or asked for) his resignation. Outside of the unfairness of the smear, which is a case by itself, this guy is obviously mocking people who have serious reservations about a certain faction inside the GOP who are actively working against Trump and his agenda.
As though people like me are anti-Semitic unthinking conspiracy theorists.
Good riddance to this creep. He is being slandered – I’ll defend him on that, but ironically, his sarcasm was slandering a lot of Trump supporters who have a legitimate gripe with that faction.
The FB comment was from Summer 2016, so he wasn’t in the government then. But I agree he shouldn’t resign. When you resign you just make people think you’re guilty.
To the point of the OP, Thomas Sowell asserted in Intellectuals and Society that intellectuals (and his definition would include journalists) rarely are held responsible for their professional mistakes. In fact, they are often promoted in spite of those mistakes.
Moderator Note:
Personal attack on post author.[REDACTED]
Isn’t it ironic?
The line between officials and allies is in this case not substantial, there is a great deal of overlap happening between the Trump White House, the reelection side and Trump & his family. They are all working towards the same purpose.
In all fairness, maybe the author doesn’t know the difference between a loose network of allies and officials.
But then, Ricochet has editors and fact-checkers, right? They are aware enough to redact comments, misreading putting the word journalists in quotes as a personal attack on the author. So maybe it’s too esoteric of a semantic ( not semitic!) challenge.
The the New York Times reported “allies” and referenced it as a “ loose network”. I haven’t seen reporting on Trump officials tasked with researching the tweets of journalists for questionable utterances. Or is this your own reporting?
People working for the same purpose are not usually performing the same tasks. In fact, they are almost never performing the same tasks. A “trump official” is quite a different animal ( no offense intended) than a trump ally. Anyone can be a Trump ally. Allies are usually unpaid and unsupervised. Officials are vetted, hired and directed.
The difference is important because many voters might find White House officials tasked with digging up dirt on journalists unseemly, even alarming. Whereas a loose network of allies doing the same is barely news.
Yes. This. Until we are willing to “punch back twice as hard,” things like this will (mysteriously) keep happening.
A shame that so many on our side will happily toss their own under the bus while hoping that the dragon will eat them last.
It’s her own words.
In the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge (1937) Pius XII condemned idolatry of race and of the state. There was already a struggle underway to urge Catholic parents to keep their kids out of Hitler Youth but many ignored the moral danger thinking what is the harm in wholesome outdoor activities and the résumé-building and college admissions boost that summers in the Hitlerjugend can provide.
Similarly, parents today send kids to ivy league schools at absurd expense and brush off the substantial risk of moral and cognitive deformation of their offspring.
Our education establishment is devoted to the project of separating youth from the moral contexts provided by parents, extended family, church, tradition and community. In every culture until the advent of modern ideological horror shows, the basic human moral reference point was whether parents, grandparents, aunts uncles, older siblings, teachers, clerics and respected elders would approve of an action at issue. Nazis, Communists and Education majors vigorously attack those contextual bonds in order to leave the state or the Party or the Narrative as the sole moral reference point.
Ben Penn and his editors apparently have no adult moral reference points. Being shown to be materially wrong, sloppy, lazy, not very bright and malicious would embarrass normal, well-adjusted, moral, non-sociopaths and result in corrective action and an apology. They instead stand by the
story PartyNarrative.Now that the Narrative has become the moral compass for the journalistic industry, It will seem like there are a lot of Ben Penns out there online.
Michelle Obama and Illhan Omar unironically made statements that were dumb and anti-American so conservatives didn’t like that. Speech does matter and it should have consequences. But sarcasm is a different deal.
Add impoverished by the loss of hyperbole to that list.
We appear to have a reversal from the Department of Labor on this.
There’s a list?