The Hill The people who have made an industry out of destroying ordinary people’s lives over old social media posts and out-of-context comments are very upset that it’s happening to them. The New York Times, clearly worried by the recent exposure of blatantly anti-Semitic tweets posted by one of its reporters, and clearly worried that even more embarassing material is in reserve, tried to stop the hemorrhaging with a rambling article demonizing the independent journalists who uncovered the tweets.
In fact, much of the liberal media sphere went into panic mode, vehemently declaring that this particular exercise of the First Amendment is actually an attack on the First Amendment. The reason why liberal editors are so distraught that independent conservative journalists are publishing evidence of the racist, anti-Semitic, and otherwise vile sentiments expressed by their supposedly “objective” employees comes down — as it usually does — to power.
Many journalists are in the profession not to inform the public, but to gain the power to destroy people who question them — and they don’t like those tactics being turned against them. “[U]sing journalistic techniques to target journalists and news organizations … is fundamentally different from the well-established role of the news media in scrutinizing people in positions of power,” the Times wrote in its article — which was of course labeled “news,” not “opinion.”
The newspaper’s publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, added that “The political operatives behind this campaign will argue that they are ‘reporting’ on news organizations in the same way that news organizations report on elected officials and other public figures,” but he roundly rejected that claim, insisting that his antagonists are trying to “manipulate the facts for political gain.”
To their credit, not everyone in the elite media world is buying it. Erik Wemple of The Washington Post and Jack Shafer of Politico both wrote rebukes of The Times’s indignation. Neither is a conservative “political operative,” but both found Sulzberger’s statement hypocritical and incongruent with The Times’s own reporting on this story. As Wemple put it, “For decades now, representatives of the mainstream media have answered conservative critiques by imploring: Judge us by the work we produce, not by the fact that more than 90 percent of us are liberal/Democratic. Mainstreamers cannot have it both ways.” READ MORE…