AP Photo/Julio Cortez Fourth Estate Why Journalists’ Old Tweets Are Fair Game for Trump New York Times editors don’t deserve special immunity from scrutiny for bigoted speech.

Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer.

Journalists don’t have thin skins, broadcaster Edward R. Murrow is reputed to have said, they have no skins. Reporters are so sensitive that you needn’t criticize their work to earn a buzz saw in the face in return. Just offer the observation, “I saw your piece,” and frown. They’ll be on you with tooth and claw in a millisecond, demanding to know what you’re implying.

And of all the thin-skinned beasts prowling the journalistic forest, few have a thinner epidermis than the boys and girls who work at the New York Times. On Monday, the Times’ immune system was activated to produce a Page One story to retaliate against pro-Trump activist Arthur Schwartz, an intimate of Donald Trump Jr. Schwartz, the Times reports, is part of a network of pro-Trumpies who have been digging for embarrassing dirt on journalists who work for Trump-critical media—CNN, the Washington Post, and, of course, the New York Times. According to the Times, the network shares its embarrassing discoveries—call them oppo research, if you’d like—with conservative political operations and then stands by to enjoy the drama.


As much as I would like to sympathize with my fellow journalists, it doesn’t strike me as unreasonable to ask them to own or repudiate vile or impolitic things they might have stated in the past. Nor is it remotely unfair for the president’s supporters to demand that journalists, who are forever denouncing him as a racist (because he is), be held accountable for their bigoted speech, on Twitter or anywhere else. Journalists don’t deserve a get-out-of-bigotry-jail free card just because they’re journalists. If their past tweets, however ancient, undercut their current journalistic work or make them sound hypocritical, they can’t blame their diminished prestige on Trump’s allies. It’s like blaming a cop for writing you a ticket for speeding in a school zone.

The Trumpies’ investigations bore small fruit last week when Breitbart published a story branding Tom Wright-Piersanti, an editor on the Times politics desk, an anti-Semite. His offenses including some ancient tweets (now deleted) he wrote during his college years that mocked Jews. In one tweet dated Jan. 1, 2010, Wright-Piersanti wrote, “I was going to ‘Crappy Jew Year,’ but one of my resolutions is to be less anti-Semitic.” In another, dated Dec. 16, 2009, he wrote, “Who called the Jew-police?” next to a photo of a Menorah.

Schwartz also called attention to offensive but old tweets posted by former CNN photojournalist Mohammed Elshamy, CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins and Washington Post reporter Josh Dawsey. [Update: The language of Dawsey's allegedly offensive tweet was ironic, as this news story illustrates.] But according to the Times, this marks only the beginning of the pro-Trump campaign against the press. The goal is to unleash a dossier of embarrassing social media posts and public statements by journalists that will “discredit news organizations deemed hostile to President Trump” and “undercut the influence of legitimate news reporting.”

Times Publisher A.G. Sulzberger did himself, his paper and his staff no favor by issuing a public memo to his staff decrying what he called an unprecedented “coordinated campaign … to attack hundreds of journalists in retaliation for coverage of the administration.” Sulzberger wrote: “This represents an escalation of an ongoing campaign against the free press.”

He can’t have read his own paper’s story about the network very closely. “The liberal group Media Matters for America helped pioneer close scrutiny of public statements by conservative media personalities,” Times reporters Kenneth P. Vogel and Jeremy W. Peters report.

And long before Media Matters was born, Reed Irvine’s Accuracy in Media was excavating potentially damaging comments for evidence of liberal bias. Founded in 1969, AIM bird-dogged CBS News, the Washington Post, the New York Times and other mainstream outlets. So encompassing was the AIM net that it attempted to snag me, a lowly freelancer, in the mid-’80s. One of Irvine’s legmen noted and then publicized some friendly comments I made before the marijuana legalization group NORML. The legman thought he’d scored some sort of gotcha. The only problem with AIM’s exposé was that I had supported—on the record—legalizing drugs for years.

Sulzberger tempered his protest toward the end of his memo by writing, “But I also want to be clear: No organization is above scrutiny, including the Times.” But that’s an example of wanting to have it both ways. If the press is not above scrutiny, it shouldn’t bellyache when truth-squadded—even if the best dirt the truth-squaders can surface is encrusted in dust and mold.

Deep scrutiny of the press—even when performed by bad faith actors like Arthur Schwartz and his ilk—is a boon, not a bane. The embarrassments unearthed by Schwartz and company will bruise the tender egos who run the Times, the Post and CNN. But in the long run, these minirevelations will help them maintain the professional standards they’re always crowing about. Instead of damning its critics for going through its staff's social media history with tweezers, the Times and A.G. Sulzberger should send them a thank you card.

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When will the tweezers fall on me? Send dirt on me via mail to [email protected]. A decade ago, my email alerts plagiarized another email list, my Twitter feed castigated left-handers, and my RSS feed robbed a convenience store.