What’s on your mind this weekend, Bleeding Heartland readers? This is an open thread: all topics welcome. Several stories related to Twitter-blocking and being thin-skinned caught my attention recently. Excerpts from the articles linked here are after the jump.
A thirteen-year-old conservative commentator and youth outreach coordinator for Senator Ted Cruz made a splash this week by alleging President Barack Obama had blocked him on Twitter. Unfortunately for CJ Pearson, Oliver Darcy researched the story for the conservative website The Blaze and concluded that Pearson’s claim “appears to be false.” Dave Weigel explored more background on the controversy and the “Pearson phenomenon” in this piece for the Washington Post.
In addition to being dishonest, Pearson made a rookie mistake. He could have gotten even more attention if he’d lied about Hillary Clinton blocking him. As Jon Allen advised in his excellent piece on the media’s “5 unspoken rules” for covering the Democratic front-runner, a surefire way to drive traffic is to “Write something nasty about a Clinton, particularly Hillary.”
A few weeks ago, I was surprised to discover that conservative talk radio host Steve Deace had blocked me on Twitter. It had been months since I’d last tangled with him. After asking around, I learned that Deace blocked other progressives around the same time, including Christian Ucles, who has worked on several Democratic campaigns and is now Iowa political director for the non-partisan League of United Latin-American Citizens. A Facebook friend shared a screenshot of a Deace tweet asserting, “some Marxist ‘media watch dog’ must have taken me out of context again. I’m busy blocking their vulgar trolls.” Bleeding Heartland has noticed before that Deace has little clue about what “Marxist” means. But I’ve never used crude or obscene language in commenting on his flawed analysis, and I try to avoid the name-calling that is a Deace hallmark (e.g. “Killary”).
On September 25, Hannah Groch-Begley published a piece at Media Matters highlighting Chris Cillizza’s intense focus on the Hillary Clinton e-mail story for the Washington Post blog The Fix. Commenting on the “highly instructive” headlines compiled by Groch-Begley, New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen added that Cillizza has blocked him. When I asked what triggered the blocking, Rosen pointed me to a tweet in which Cillizza said he had done so “long ago” because “Rock throwing from the sidelines is the world’s easiest profession.”
I am stunned that any journalist would dismiss Rosen’s huge body of published work on media criticism as “rock throwing from the sidelines.” Scroll to the end of this post to read excerpts from Rosen’s comments about being blocked by someone who exemplifies the “savvy style” of reporting. Better yet, click through to read that whole post.
For what it’s worth, Cillizza stands by his choice to write more than 50 posts on the Clinton e-mail controversy. He has previously said he does not “keep track of how many ‘good’ or ‘bad’ things I write about each side” and views his role as reporting and analyzing news without grading whether it’s positive or negative for a given candidate. Groch-Begley pointed out that “nearly all” of Cillizza’s posts about the e-mails include “dire warnings about the supposedly ‘massive political problem.'”
From Oliver Darcy’s September 24 story for The Blaze: “Fact Check: Did Obama Really Block a 13-Year-Old Conservative Critic on Twitter?” (click through to view screen shots)
As his sole evidence, Pearson produced a purported screen grab showing he was no longer permitted to follow the president or see his tweets. […]
However, a closer inspection reveals there are problems with his claim.
First, Twitter users aren’t permitted to follow accounts that block them, yet Pearson could be seen following Obama’s account moments after making the claim he was blocked. […]
Moreover, the screen grab provided by Pearson appears to have been a copy of one uploaded online months ago. […]
There are other problems too. Aspects of the image appear to suggest it was a digitally manipulated photo. […]
TheBlaze asked Pearson on Wednesday three times for the original image so that it could be examined. Pearson did not respond to those requests. Prior to asking, he had been very quick to respond.
From David Weigel’s September 25 piece for the Washington Post: “Why did a 13-year-old conservative star apparently hoax the White House?”
Pearson entered the political life with gusto, and no qualms. His first video, in February, was inspired by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani ranting to a room of conservative donors (and a pre-presidential bid Scott Walker) that President Obama did not love America.
“I don’t want to be politically correct,” said Pearson. “I don’t care about being politically correct at this point. President Obama: You don’t love America. If you loved America, you would call ISIS what it is… if you loved America, President Obama, you wouldn’t try to take away what hard-working Americans have worked for their entire lives.”
That video scored two million views, success Pearson wouldn’t achieve on YouTube again until this month. […]
Pearson had done more than speak. He’d left the impression that his speech was being silenced. In March, after the Giuliani video went viral, Pearson’s Facebook account was closed. He was 12 years old when he shot the video, and as Facebook told reporters, no one could have an account until age 13. Pearson was not having it. He told a local Fox News affiliate that the First Amendment was “obviously not a big concern to the powers that be at Facebook.” He told national Fox News that “time and time again, Facebook has shut down many conservative accounts after they decide to speak up.”[…]
[…]Reached on Twitter and at his campaign e-mail account, Pearson did not respond to questions. According to Cruz spokesman Rick Tyler, CJ Pearson remains part of the campaign.
Screen shot I grabbed on September 10 (at this writing, I am still blocked):
Screenshot grabbed by a friend on September 10:
From Hannah Groch-Begley’s September 25 piece for Media Matters, “50 Headlines That Reveal Wash. Post Reporter Chris Cillizza’s Obsession With The Clinton Email Story.”
The New York Times first wrote about Clinton’s email during her tenure at the State Department on March 2, when they falsely reported she had violated federal requirements by using a private email account. Since then, mainstream media outlets have attempted to find some scandal in the email story, often pushing various falsehoods and being forced to issue corrections after the fact. To date, there has been no evidence of any lawbreaking.
Cillizza has been a major contributor to this effort, repeatedly claiming the email story “just keeps getting worse” and that it’s “not going away,” while claiming Clinton has an “honesty problem” and should “start panicking.”
Just this week, Cillizza wrote a post headlined “Just when you thought the e-mail story couldn’t get worse for Hillary Clinton …” The post misleadingly tried to repackage old email stories as new developments in the “scandal.”
From Cillizza’s September 26 response, “Why I’ve written 50 posts on Hillary Clinton’s e-mails.”
I have written lots and lots of blog posts about Hillary Clinton’s e-mail issues since the story came to light in March. And I stand by every one.
Here’s why:
1. Hillary Clinton began this race as the biggest non-incumbent front-runner for a party’s presidential nomination in the post-World War II era. […] The best way to understand how she handles everything from the mundane day-to-day activities of governance to the crises that present themselves from time to time is by studying not just her public actions at the State Department but the thinking behind those decisions. […]
2. No secretary of state has ever used a private e-mail server exclusively. For all of Clinton’s insistence that this was standard operating procedure for government officials, it wasn’t. […]
3. The story about the e-mail server has changed. Repeatedly. […] A story that keeps changing like that bears further analysis and investigation.
4. I write a blog. I write a lot of posts. […] I guarantee you that I have written more than 50 posts about Donald Trump in that time.
I understand that organizations like Media Matters exist to work the referees.
From a Facebook comment Jay Rosen posted on August 12:
I am a critic of the political press in this country. I have been writing about it since the 1988 campaign: 27 years. At my site, pressthink.org, I have probably published 100+ pieces on the subject. I have also written for Salon.com, The Nation, the Guardian and the Washington Post (among others) about what’s wrong with political journalism. More than that, I am specifically a critic of the insider style of analysis and the perspective on politics in which The Fix and Chris Cillizza specialize. I have given a name to it (the “savvy” style) and developed a running critique of savviness that I practice on social media and in the essays that I produce several times a year. That project has been underway for about 10 years. It’s at the extreme opposite of drive-by criticism.
I consider Cillizza, along with Mark Halperin of Bloomberg, to be the exemplar of the savvy style and thus a leading figure in a school of analysis that has spread beyond a few practitioners to become a kind of default setting in political journalism, especially in election campaigns. Meaning: if you were starting a news organization and you had zero ideas of your own, so you just hired experienced political journalists to cover the 2016 campaign, they would reproduce the savvy style without consciously deciding on it. In this sense The Fix is actually important, which is why I write about it: the site and the person.
Certainly I am not above throwing a few rocks made of 140 characters. I’m sure there’s some drive-by digs at The Fix in the Twitter archives, and even cases where I was unfair or flippant. But “rock throwing” is not what I do for a living. I write about Cillizza and what’s insidious in his chosen forms.