{"id":65689,"date":"2021-03-10T23:47:02","date_gmt":"2021-03-11T05:47:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=65689"},"modified":"2021-03-10T23:47:02","modified_gmt":"2021-03-11T05:47:02","slug":"65689","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=65689","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

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BLUF:
\nKnowing that you will be vilified as some kind of brute abuser if you criticize a\u00a0New York Times\u00a0reporter is, for many people, too high of a price to pay for doing it. So people instead refrain, stay quiet, and that is the obvious objective of this lowly strategy.<\/em><\/p>\n

Criticizing Public Figures, Including Influential Journalists, is Not Harassment or Abuse<\/a>.
\nAs social media empowers uncredentialed people to be heard, society’s most powerful actors seek to cast themselves as victims and delegitimize all critiques.<\/em><\/p>\n

The most powerful<\/strong>\u00a0and influential newspaper in the U.S., arguably the West, is\u00a0The New York Times.\u00a0<\/em>Journalists who write for it, especially those whose work is featured on its front page or in its op-ed section, wield immense power to shape public discourse, influence thought, set the political agenda for the planet\u2019s most powerful nation, expose injustices, or ruin the lives of public figures and private citizens alike. That is an enormous amount of power in the hands of one media institution and its employees. That\u2019s why it calls itself the Paper of Record.<\/p>\n

One of the Paper of Record\u2019s star reporters, Taylor Lorenz, has been much discussed of late. That is so for three reasons. The first is that the thirty-six-year-old tech and culture reporter has helped innovate a new kind of reportorial beat that seems to have a couple of purposes. She publishes articles exploring in great detail the online culture of\u00a0teenagers and very young adults<\/a>, which, as a father of two young Tik-Tok-using children, I have found occasionally and mildly interesting. She also seeks to catch famous and non-famous people alike using bad words or being in close digital proximity to bad people so that she\u00a0can alert<\/a>\u00a0the rest of the world to these important findings. It is natural that journalists who pioneer a new form of reporting this way are going to be discussed.<\/p>\n

The second reason Lorenz is the topic of recent discussion is that she has been repeatedly caught fabricating claims about influential people, and attempting to ruin the reputations and lives of decidedly non-famous people. In the last six weeks alone, she\u00a0twice<\/a>\u00a0publicly lied<\/a>\u00a0about Netscape founder Marc Andreessen: once claiming he used the word \u201cretarded\u201d in a Clubhouse room in which she was lurking (he had not) and then accusing him of plotting with a white nationalist in a different Clubhouse room to attack her (he, in fact, had said nothing).<\/p>\n

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She also often uses her large, powerful public platform to malign private citizens without any power or public standing by accusing them of harboring bad beliefs and\/or associating with others who do. (She is currently being sued by a citizen named Arya Toufanian, who claims Lorenz has used her private Twitter account to destroy her reputation and business, particularly with a tweet that Lorenz kept pinned at the top of her Twitter page\u00a0for eight months<\/em>, while several other non-public figures complain that Lorenz has \u201creported\u201d on their non-public activities). It is to be expected that a\u00a0New York Times\u00a0<\/em>journalist who gets caught lying as she did against Andreessen and trying to destroy the reputations of non-public figures will be a topic of conversation.<\/p>\n

The third reason this\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0reporter is receiving attention is because she has become a leading advocate and symbol for a toxic tactic now frequently used by wealthy and influential public figures (like her) to delegitimize criticisms and even render off-limits any attempt to hold them accountable. Specifically, she and her media allies constantly conflate criticisms of people like them with \u201charassment,\u201d \u201cabuse\u201d and even \u201cviolence.\u201d<\/p>\n

That is what Lorenz did on Tuesday when she co-opted International Women\u2019s Day to\u00a0announce<\/a>\u00a0that \u201cit is not an exaggeration to say that the harassment and smear campaign I have had to endure over the past year has destroyed my life.\u201d She began her story by proclaiming: \u201cFor international women\u2019s day please consider supporting women enduring online harassment.\u201d She finished it with this: \u201cNo one should have to go through this.\u201d Notably, there was no mention, by her or her many media defenders, of the lives she has harmed or otherwise deleteriously affected with her massive journalistic platform.<\/p>\n

That is deliberate. Under this formulation, if you criticize the ways Lorenz uses her very influential media perch \u2014 including by pointing out that she probably should stop fabricating accusations against people and monitoring the private acts of non-public people \u2014 then you are guilty of harassing a \u201cyoung woman\u201d and inflicting emotional pain and violence on her (it\u2019s quite a bizarre dynamic, best left to psychologists, how her supporters\u00a0insist<\/a>\u00a0on infantilizing this fully grown, close-to-middle-aged successful journalist by talking about her as if she\u2019s a fragile high school junior; it\u2019s particularly creepy when her good male Allies speak of her this way).<\/p>\n

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\"TwitterMason \ud83c\udfc3\u200d\u2642\ufe0f\u2702\ufe0f\ud800\udccf <\/span>@webdevMason<\/span><\/div>\n

@ggreenwald<\/span> Taylor Lorenz went after me on-and-off for weeks over my activity on Clubhouse, screencapping my invites and rooms and insinuating to her following that I was some sort of racist nutcase. The only woman she’s ever given a flying fuck about is herself.<\/a><\/p>\n

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March 9th 2021<\/p>\n

220<\/span> Retweets<\/span>1,720<\/span> Likes<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

This is worth focusing on precisely because it is now so common among the nation\u2019s political and media elite. By no means is this tactic unique to Lorenz. She did not pioneer it. She is just latching onto it, exploiting it, in order to immunize herself from criticisms of her destructive journalistic misconduct and to depict her critics as violent harassers and abusers. With this framework implanted, there is no way to express criticisms of Taylor Lorenz\u2019s work and the use and abuse of her journalistic platform without standing widely accused of maliciously inciting a mob of violent misogynists to ruin her life \u2014 that\u2019s quite a potent shield from accountability for someone this influential in public life.<\/p>\n

But this is now a commonplace tactic among the society\u2019s richest, most powerful and most influential public figures. The advent of the internet has empowered the riff-raff, the peasants, the unlicensed and the uncredentialed \u2014 those who in the past were blissfully silent and invisible \u2014 to be heard, often with irreverence and even contempt for those who wield the greatest societal privileges, such as a star\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0reporter. By recasting themselves as oppressed, abused and powerless rather than what they are (powerful oppressors who sometimes abuse their power), elite political and media luminaries seek to completely reverse the dynamic.<\/p>\n

During Hillary Clinton\u2019s ill-fated 2016 presidential campaign, one of the most common tactics used by her political and media supporters was to cast criticisms of her (largely from supporters of Bernie Sanders) not as ideological or political but as misogynistic, thus converting one of the world\u2019s richest and most powerful political figures into some kind of a victim, exactly when she was seeking to obtain for herself the planet\u2019s most powerful political office. There was no way to criticize Hillary Clinton \u2014 there still is not \u2014 without being branded a misogynist.<\/p>\n

A very similar tactic was used four years later to vilify anyone criticizing Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) \u2014 also one of the world\u2019s richest and most powerful figures \u2014 as she sought the power of the Oval Office. A major media theme was that she was being brutally assaulted by Sanders supporters who were using snake emojis to express dissatisfaction with what they believed was her less-than-scrupulous campaign, such as relying on\u00a0millions of dollars in dark money<\/a>\u00a0from an anonymous Silicon Valley billionaire to stay in the race long after the immense failure of her campaign was manifest, and attempting to depict Sanders as a woman-hating cretin. When Warren finally withdrew from the race after having placed no better than third in any state\u00a0including her own<\/em>, Rachel Maddow devoted a good chunk of her interview with the Senator and best-selling author to exploring the deep trauma she experienced from the snake emojis.<\/p>\n