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.'”
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