When Virtue-Signaling Backfires

Trump Allies Target Journalists Over Coverage Deemed Hostile to White House is the scare headline in Monday's New York Times.

The lead paragraph follows up with the desired alarmist tone. Cue Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia - or if you're not all that adventuresome, just settle for Joe McCarthy's America:

A loose network of conservative operatives allied with the White House is pursuing what they say will be an aggressive operation to discredit news organizations deemed hostile to President Trump by publicizing damaging information about journalists.

OK, so at least Trump hasn't as far as we know yet ordered a hit on a reporter, as Richard Nixon did on muckraker Jack Anderson. Or seized the phone records of reporters and subpoenaed journalists to testify against whistleblowers, as Barack Obama did.

So are the Trumpies going through reporters' garbage to glean their private financial information? Interviewing old girlfriends or boyfriends or spouses to dig up some sleazy dirt on them? Tapping their phones? Hacking their email accounts? Breaking into doctors' offices to steal their medical or psychiatric records?

Well, not quite:

 It is the latest step in a long-running effort by Mr. Trump and his allies to undercut the influence of legitimate news reporting. Four people familiar with the operation described how it works, asserting that it has compiled dossiers of potentially embarrassing social media posts and other public statements by hundreds of people who work at some of the country’s most prominent news organizations.

This is truly shocking stuff. The Trumpies have had the unmitigated gall to read embarrassing information posted by the journalists themselves on social media. And not just regular journalists, like the ones targeted by the Washington Post and the shadowy Prop Or Not organization in 2016,which accused both right-wing and leftist writers of being witting or unwitting Putin operatives who helped steal the election from Hillary Clinton. The public social media posts that are being collected by the Trump operatives were written by employees of some of the most prominent and important news organizations in all of Corporate America. And the operatives are not only reading their social media posts, they are nefariously secreting them in Putinesque dossiers for sordid political purposes!

The Times breathlessly continues:

Operatives have closely examined more than a decade’s worth of public posts and statements by journalists, the people familiar with the operation said. Only a fraction of what the network claims to have uncovered has been made public, the people said, with more to be disclosed as the 2020 election heats up. The research is said to extend to members of journalists’ families who are active in politics, as well as liberal activists and other political opponents of the president.

How can one make something public that is already in the public domain, for all to see? Could the "research" extending to journalists' families possibly include the widely-known fact that the spouse of NBC anchor Chuck Todd is a paid Democratic Party official, or that CNN personality Chris Cuomo is the brother of the New York governor, or that CNN legal analyst Laura Jarrett is the daughter of chief Obama aide Valerie Jarrett, or that nepotism is pretty much a standard hiring and promotion principle within the consolidated, oligarch-controlled media? The Trump operatives aren't saying, and neither is the New York Times. But when the operatives do leak out their treasure trove of widely available speech transcripts and public tweets and Facebook posts, I'm sure that the Times and the Post and all the rest of the Prominents will be right on it.

Of course, if the right-wing operatives are also targeting lesser-known (and unprotected) critics and writers, that would be a completely different story, ranking right down there with Prop Or Not. But it's telling that the Times seems to be restricting its First Amendment concerns to its own employees and to those employees of other "major" outlets.

No prominent major outlet has ever, for example, written critically about the Prop Or Not smear campaign against some 200 relatively powerless writers and websites. We still don't know the identities of those who compiled the blacklist and tried to ruin the careers and reputations of those decidedly non-prominent journalists.

While it keeps its readers in suspense, the Times claims that at this moment it is virtually impossible for them to speculate on future possibly career-destroying leaks. This is especially true since the already-leaked media posts were all true,  and even future, already-public information from the past is also true, mainly because the targets themselves had already openly and honestly leaked and exposed and even bragged their own dirt and hypocrisy back when, as the Times insists, they were mainly callow, brash young adults who didn't know enough to keep their vile qualities to themselves.

Nonetheless, the Times pleads ignorance, because admitting that it doesn't examine either its potential hires' or its current employees' social media histories would be tantamount to admitting that they really don't care if their staffers don't practice or believe in what they now preach. They are loath to admit that their screening practices are also a bit on the shoddy side. The newspaper was caught with its pants spectacularly down only last year, when new editorial hire Sarah Jeong was fired after only six hours on the job when her own fairly well-known public association with Neo-Nazis was publicly "leaked" all over social media.

But that was then, and the Times has conveniently shoved that ancient truth down its memory hole. And this is Now: 

It is not possible to independently assess the claims about the quantity or potential significance of the material the pro-Trump network has assembled. Some involved in the operation have histories of bluster and exaggeration. And those willing to describe its techniques and goals may be trying to intimidate journalists or their employers.
But the material publicized so far, while in some cases stripped of context or presented in misleading ways, has proved authentic, and much of it has been professionally harmful to its targets.

It is not until we delve deep into the Times coverage that we get to the true nitty-gritty of the piece. Here is the carefully buried lead: it seems that a pair of editorials decrying Donald Trump's recent anti-Semitic remarks and the shady employment past of his new press secretary had been edited by a staffer on the political desk who a decade ago had written a bunch of his own nasty racist and anti-Semitic tweets. And when the Trumpies called the newly "race-woke" paper out on its hypocrisy, the Gray Lady was not amused:

One person involved in the effort said the pro-Trump forces, aware ahead of time about the coverage... were prepared to respond. Early Thursday morning, soon after the profile appeared online, Breitbart News published an article that documented anti-Semitic and racist tweets written a decade ago by Tom Wright-Piersanti, who was in college at the time and has since become an editor on the Times’ politics desk. The Times said it was reviewing the matter and considered the posts “a clear violation of our standards.”

My published comment:

The right-wingers are using "reverse virtue-signaling" and cashing in on the obnoxious Call-Out Culture to do damage to writers whom they perceive to be their political opponents.

When, for example, they exposed a reporter's old anti-Semitic tweets, it wasn't for the purpose of fighting xenophobia, but to gleefully point out that liberals ("elites") can at times be as hypocritical as reactionary neo-fascists. This is not to excuse the anti-Semitic tweets by the reporter, because a 20-something should know better. His excuse that he was only trying to rile up his peers falls flat.

 Journalists and aspiring journalists, and for that matter, anybody who cares about their careers and life prospects should probably just stay the heck off Twitter. As the article points out, once you press "submit" or "send" there is no going back. Your whole life can be ruined because of a few ill-advised words that will float forever in cyberspace to be plucked, sliced, diced and taken out of context.

What's more disturbing, to me, is that the Trumpies are also targeting the relatives of reporters in an obvious effort to get them to self-censor. It has the whiff of organized criminal extortionists who threaten the children of their targets to get them to pay up and shut up.

 Journalists and all writers should fearlessly keep writing articles and commentary and forgo Twitter wars and trolling. It's a waste of their talents, it's mentally exhausting, and it can come back to bite them.

Like a bedbug in the New York Times "Wellness Room" for embattled and Twitter-exhausted journalists.