The journalists who cry 'harassment'

The New York Times, the most influential and powerful news organization in the United States and possibly the entire world, issued a statement yesterday decrying Tucker Carlson for what they described as a "calculated and cruel" attack on one of their journalists, Taylor Lorenz. According to the Times, the comments made by Carlson were intended to "unleash a wave of harassment and vitriol" against the culture reporter who should be allowed to do her job "without facing harassment."

The statement seems fair enough at face value, journalists should certainly not face harassment for their work, but the statement leaves out most of the story, the context which sparked Carlson's critique of Lorenz. The paper also did not specify what Carlson had said which constituted harassment.

All of this begs the question: who is Taylor Lorenz, and why was she being criticized by America's most-watched cable news personality?

Taylor Lorenz was hired by The New York Times in late 2019 to cover technology and culture, having been noticed primarily for her coverage of generation Z, or "zoomer," culture. Most notably, Lorenz has been recognized for bringing the phrase "okay boomer" into the national lexicon after noticing its growing popularity on Tik Tok and other online spaces dominated by young people.

More recently, however, Lorenz has become the subject of controversy for a pattern of deceitful and defamatory behaviour on Twitter.

The controversy began with a tweet about Marc Andreessen, a tech entrepreneur who made his name co-founding Netscape. Lorenz, who was listening in on a conversation held on the social media app Clubhouse, falsely accused Andreesen of using the word "retard."

Clubhouse itself has been the subject of controversy in the media sphere, with many journalists criticizing the platform for not saving conversations. According to some left-leaning journalists, Clubhouse does not do enough to combat misinformation and hate speech. In other words, the app is not censorious enough.

After it was clarified by chatroom moderator Nait Jones that the word was used by another person in the chat to describe how members of the subreddit r/WallStreetBets referred to themselves, Lorenz deleted her defamatory tweet and thanked Jones for "clarifying" what actually took place in the chat, although she never apologized for her false statement.

Humiliated by the debacle, Lorenz sought to shift the narrative away from her false reporting by continuing to attack Andreessen. Only a few weeks later, Lorenz tweeted that Andreesen was bashing her in a Clubhouse chatroom with activist Charles C. Johnson. This also turned out to be a falsehood, Andreessen never mentioned Lorenz in the entire conversation.

The next month, on International Women's Day, Lorenz leaned even further into her own victim complex, tweeting that the "harassment and smear campaign" against her had "destroyed [her] life." Yes, the 36-year-old journalist working for the most powerful news organization in the western world, who attended a Swiss boarding school before being recognized by Fortune Magazine as one of the "40 under 40," wants you to know that she is, in fact, a victim, and that her life has been "destroyed," all because she received backlash after making defamatory accusations against others.

Of course, it doesn't take a genius to recognize Lorenz's glaring hypocrisy. After repeatedly lying about the behaviour of Mr. Andreessen, Lorenz has the gall to claim that she is the one being harassed, and not the people she is stalking and defaming. Nay, criticizing her behaviour is not only harassment, but is, in fact, violence, as she later linked to the Coalition Against Online Violence in the same Twitter thread.

Carlson, as one would expect, did not buy the self-victimization narrative Lorenz was selling, and briefly mocked her on his show on Tuesday in a segment that was mainly about the recent controversies within the British royal family. Carlson used Lorenz as an example to make a point that the most powerful members of our society, facing a crisis of meaning in their lives, use identity politics to claim that they are being oppressed by far less powerful people than themselves.

Carlson's mockery of Lorenz's victim complex is what drove the Times to issue the statement decrying his "calculated and cruel attack," but it did not stop there. On Wednesday, Carlson devoted a much longer segment of his show to mocking both Lorenz and The New York Times.

"It's a pretty good scam the New York Times has going," Carlson said. "They get to hurt you at will but you’re not allowed to notice. Notice what they are doing and you are 'calculated and cruel.'"

Carlson is not the only journalist who has weighed in on the controversy. Glenn Greenwald, an impressive journalist with a real record of exposing abuse of power, also took to criticizing Lorenz, as well as the mainstream media in general.

Greenwald is best known for releasing the bombshell story of Edward Snowden, who revealed the United States government's illegal mass surveillance program. Greenwald eventually moved to Brazil where he lives with his husband and has spent much of his time reporting on the corruption of the regime of President Jair Bolsonaro. He has been repeatedly threatened with deportation and imprisonment by the Brazilian government for his reporting, and never leaves the house without protection from armed bodyguards. Needless to say, Greenwald knows what it means to be targeted and harassed as a journalist.

Greenwald has no time for whiny privileged New York Times journalists who think any and all criticism of them constitutes harassment. He also has little time for their style of reporting, which he has dubbed "tattletale journalism" to describe their intensive focus on inconsequential "microaggressions" such as using the word "retard."

"Under this rubric [journalists] want to construct, they can malign anyone they want, ruin people's reputations, and unite to generate hatred against their chosen targets, but nobody can even criticize them," he wrote in a recent article on Substack.

Greenwald noted an article defending Lorenz by former BuzzFeed journalist Ryan Broderick, who was fired from his outlet after it was revealed that he routinely engaged in plagiarism. Broderick accused Greenwald of sparking a wave of harassment against Lorenz for daring to criticize her oppressed soul, ultimately concluding that Substack needs to develop stricter harassment policies to prevent people like Greenwald from criticizing journalists.

"One thing that worried me was how simplistic their definition of harassment was," Broderick wrote of the outlet. He further wrote that "online harassment is a constantly evolving process of boundary testing" and that "dealing with people like Greenwald is going to be much harder to moderate than your average troll."

The article which Broderick was referring to when he suggested that Greenwald was harassing Lorenz was an article critiquing the "tattletale journalism" industry, taking specific aim at America's largest media outlets and their reporters. Greenwald also criticized big tech companies in the article, noting that they are the ones who take on the responsibility of censorship after receiving demands from mainstream media journalists.

The plagiarist did not just take aim at Greenwald, however, as he also mentioned by name Bari Weiss, Andrew Sullivan, Jesse Singal, among others. In a later tweet, Broderick described these journalists as a "growing community of right-wing culture warriors," even though the idea that Greenwald, or Weiss, or Singal could be considered "right-wing" is patently ridiculous to anyone who has followed their careers.

Broderick's article received praise from a number of journalists, but also one of the vice presidents of Google, who said that harassment policies "can't be afterthoughts anymore for serious businesses." Such a statement should not be surprising for someone from the enforcement arm of the mainstream media's censorship campaigns.

The ultimate goal of all this, if these journalists have not made themselves clear enough, is to have their critics and enemies censored, or at the very least monitored. Whether it's on Substack, Clubhouse, Parler, or any other platform, journalists are constantly demanding that more be done to censor the archaic speech of the plebeians, as opposed to the respectable and praiseworthy speech that they have to offer. If you do not think that Taylor Lorenz is a "talented New York Times journalist doing timely and essential reporting," then your opinion on her should probably be censored.

The lesson to be learned from this drama is that the journalists who cried harassment, much like the boy who cried wolf, should not be taken seriously. The ulterior motivations of these journalists is glaringly obvious, and they are more than willing to engage in much more sinister behaviour, some of which actually could arguably qualify as harassment, when it suits their needs.

The most prominent example of this is the story of the Covington Catholic School kids, and Nicholas Sandman in particular. Sandman was smeared as a white supremacist, among other horrifying accusations, for having simply smirked while attending a protest in Washington DC.

The Covington Catholic kids are far from the only example. In 2017, CNN admitted to tracking down and threatening to dox a Redditor for making a meme of Trump body slamming them. Mainstream media outlets delightfully parroted the narrative of Oumou Kanoute, a privileged college student who lied about being the victim of racism in a debacle that threatened the job security of three innocent working-class employees.

The New York Times is especially guilty in this. Late last year, the paper published an article sympathetic to a child who had maliciously saved a years-old video from a classmate in which she had used the n-word, only to release it long after the classmate had apologized in order to prevent her from getting into her dream college. The paper is more than willing to engage in direct harassment as well, with their journalist Nikole Hannah Jones publicly revealing the phone number of a journalist she did not like.

To mainstream media journalists, this type of "journalism" is both necessary and heroic. Criticizing their methods for the lackluster, tabloid-esque trash that it is, however, is harassment. Not only that, but outlets such as Substack which allow these oppressed journalists to be criticized must be boycotted or must take more editorial control over their writers. Not doing so is, in fact, dangerous, and a threat to the integrity of journalism.

If these journalists had any shame, they would be embarrassed by their fragile egos and leave real journalism to mature adults. But they don't, and they won't, so for now, all we can do is continue to criticize and mock the hall monitor journalists who use frivolous claims of harassment to promote the censorship of their critics. Maybe if they're driven crazy enough they might actually leave the industry altogether or have an epiphany but, most likely, it will lead normal, sensible people to realize their self-victimization for the censorious ruse that it truly is.