Topic: Media Research Center
We showed how the Media Research Center's hate campaign against Washington post reporter Taylor Lorenz for accurately reporting the identify of the woman behind the anti-LGBT Libs of TikTok Twitter account got started, but it was just getting warmed up. Nicholas Fondacaro howled that the Post defended Lorenz's story:
In a statement penned Tuesday, Washington Post senior managing editor Cameron Barr stepped up to defend hypocritical malefactor Taylor Lorenz after she doxed the owner of the Libs of TikTok Twitter account, including her identity and address, all because she exposed the lunatics, groomers, and general extremists of the left. And rightfully, there was a great public outcry against the paper.
Laughably calling Lorenz an “accomplished and diligent journalist,” Barr said her “reporting methods comport entirely with The Washington Post’s professional standards.”
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In addition to writing about how the user once lived in New York City and moved to Los Angeles, Lorenz noted the account holder was a real estate agent and a member of the Orthodox Jewish community. And she did, in fact, link to personal information before the paper was called out and silently deleted the link without an editor’s note or admission of guilt.
NewsBusters has confirmed (though we won’t share methods) that the link led to information tied to the user’s real estate license. The information included her full name, address, county, her employer, and her license number.
In fact, Lorenz doxxed nobody. Raichik's personal information was found on publicly available websites; a link to one of them was quickly deleted. Fondacaro then demonstrated his ignorance of how journalism works by portraying standard reporting methods like going to someone's hous eand talking to them or confirming someone's identity as dangerous:
Lorenz even bragged about harassing her target’s family at their homes. “A woman at the address listed to Raichik’s name in Los Angeles declined to identify herself. On Monday night, a tweet from Glenn Greenwald confirmed the house that was visited belonged to [Chaya] Raichik’s family,” she wrote.
She even threatened someone with a similar name as her victim. “You’ve been mentioned as the administrator of the ‘Libs of TikTok’ account (…) you’re being implicated as starting a hate campaign against LGBTQ people…” she wrote to them in a direct message on Twitter demanding comment.
Fondacaro then gloated that Lorenz was feeling "reap what you sow" by noting that people (like Fondacaro) angry with her story were engaged in actual doxxing of her, her familyand "any random friend I've tagged" on Instagram.
Kevin Tober touted how Raichik ran to the Fox News show of Tucker Carlson to play victim about being exposed by "leftist sleazebag" Lorenz. She also let her homophobic flag fly by smearing the LBGT people she posts on her account as "psychopaths." Tober then huffed: "What Taylor Lorenz did was not journalism, it was intimidation with the purpose of making Raichik go away and shut her account down. There’s no other possible explanation for publishing her personal information online. " Again: Lorenz did not "publish" Raichik's personal information.
Tim Graham's April 20 podcast also lashed out at Lorenz as well, whining that she and the Post are part of a "left-wing outrage machine" for exposing Raichik, whining that the story is a "very one-sided pile of propaganda, loaded with LGBTQ media monitors and ACLU activists" and insisting that all Libs of TikTok does is posts videos of LGBTQ people "obviously prosteletyzing and propagandizing" and who are feeding their children "gender identify propaganda." Graham repeated the MRC talking point that Lorenz doxxed Raichik, and ranted that Lorenz engaged in basic reporting behavior: "Talyor Lorenz was not Woodward and Bernstein.... Look, a lot of people don't like it. They don't like a reporter coming and knocking on your door."
Graham then played whataboutism, huffing that the Post felt it "simply must rip the veil of anonymity from a popular Twitter accountw hen the Washington Post, for the last few decades, thas lived and thrived on anonymous sources that get to establish narratives and feed that left-wing outrage machine without anyone knowing who they are."
Fondacaro returned to lash out at frequent MRC target Brian Stelter, complaining that the CNN host "refused to address the 'roiling debate' and 'ethics' of the Washington Post and hypocritical malefactor Taylor Lorenz releasing the name and address of the Libs of TikTok account owner. Instead, he brought on a radical liberal teacher to rail against the account and concerned parents." Rob Shimshock accused the Internet Archive of allegedly having "apparently excluded from its database screenshots of the Twitter account of Washington Post columnist Taylor Lorenz, after Lorenz doxxed the identity and location of an individual who poked fun at leftists on Twitter." Yes apprently destroying people's lives by posting out-of-context clips of them is merely "poking fun" in the eyes of the MRC.
P.J. Gladnick, meanwhile, fixated on doxxing semantics:
The Atlantic magazine has come up with a creative but laughable way to defend the extreme doxxing by Washington Post writer Taylor Lorenz, who once was a staff writer at their periodical. Their tactic is to broaden the definition of "doxxing" to make it fluid enough to serve the purposes of liberals. Therefore, according to the Atlantic's semantics game, what the Libs of Tik Tok did by presenting unedited videos uploaded by liberals to the very public TikTok platform was somehow "doxxing;" but when Lorenz exposed the name and other personal information of the creator of Libs of TikTok that wasn't really doxxing at all.
If you are scratching your heads at the absurdity of that stance, at least Atlantic admits it in the title of their article by Kaitlyn Tiffany on Friday, "Doxxing Means Whatever You Want It To." The subtitle submerges even deeper into the realm of the surreal with "The word once defined a category of behaviors. Now it expresses an emotion."
Gladnick didn't explain what was "extreme" about Lorenz's "doxxing"; he also didn't rebut the Atlantic writer;'s argument that "Raichik’s identity is in the public interest, given the account’s political goals; it was also easily discovered via a domain-registration website." Instead, he complained aout the argument that Raichik was guilty of doxxing by posting videos of people she hated for purposes of riducule and harassmesnt: "Creative definitions of 'doxxing' make Libs of TikTok guilty of that practice while Lorenz gets a free pass if you so desire thanks to very convenient semantic tricks."
Kevin Tober was still whining about the whole doxxing thing in an April 24 post, nearly a week after Lorenz's story came out, ready to heap more abuse on Lorenz:
On Sunday, leftist sleazebag and professional victim Taylor Lorenz of The Washington Post appeared on CNN’s Reliable Sources to double down on her lie that she never doxxed the woman behind the popular Twitter account Libs of TikTok. Which is a bald-faced lie.
Despite the fact that Chaya Raichik of Libs of Tiktok is more of a journalist than she will ever be, Lorenz proceeded to trash the account as hateful and that it “is targeting LGBTQ folks.” She claimed that “the entire goal of the account is to direct hate to trans and LGBTQ people. She said she doesn't believe gay people who come out should be allowed to teach children.”
Tober did not dispute Lorenz's depiction of Libs of TikTok and its mission. Still the whining continued:
Lorenz’s next denial was claiming that she “absolutely did not reveal any personal information” about Raichik and thumbed her nose at critics by claiming “reporting practices can seem foreign to people that are not familiar with journalism.”
She proceeded to attack conservative media by claiming they lie and spin up narratives with the goal to “sow doubt and to discredit journalism.”
Lorenz has done much discredit journalism. So, it’s ironic that she is accusing anyone else of lying when that is all she did during her entire interview. It is a fact that she revealed or “doxxed” the woman behind Libs of TikTok. In her original story for The Washington Post, she linked to her home address before it was subsequently removed.
Again: Her address was only in a link, not in the article, and the link -- to publicly available information -- was dropped shortly after the article was posted.
Nowhere in these posts did the MRC mention that Raichik deleted thousands of posts from the Libs of TikTok account before and after her identify was revealed, and that more of her homophobia was revealed in falsely smearing the suicide prevntion organization The Trevor Project as a "grooming organization." Ironically, it was also revealed that Raichick engaged in actual doxxing, posting a woman's name, address, workplace and phone number, then boasted of having people call her employer -- debunking any claim by the MRC that the account is only about"poking fun." Raichik was also busted for posting a false claim, directing readers exactly where to lash out at the false claim, then tried to keep the story alive after it was proven false.
Alex Pareene wrote an excellent summary of the exceedingly hostile response of the MRC and other right-wing activists to Lorenz's story:
These people on this ascendant right don't just have different ideas about the role and function of journalism; they don't just believe journalists are biased liberals; they don't just believe the media is too hostile to conservatives; they are hostile to the concept of journalism itself. As in, uncovering things dutifully and carefully and attempting to convey your findings to the public honestly.
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This new right fundamentally doesn’t want "newsgathering" to happen. They want a chaotic information stream of unverifiable bullshit and context collapse and propaganda. Their backers, the people behind the whole project, are philosophically and materially opposed to the idea that true things should be uncovered and verified and disseminated publicly about, well, them, and their projects. This may have started as a politically opportunistic war against particular outlets and stories, but it has quickly blossomed into a worldview. It’s an ideologically coherent opposition to the liberal precepts of verifiability and transparency, and the holders of those precepts are too invested in them to understand what their enemy is doing. The creep’s account, everyone in the press should understand, is the model for what they will be replaced with.
The MRC wants more of the hate that Libs of TikTok dishes out, and it doesn't want the haters to be held accountable. That's not "media research" -- that's political activism, deliberate sabotage and personal destruction.
