Nadine Hoffman
International Women’s Media Foundation Deputy Director
Dear Miss Hoffmann,
As you may know, I am one of the students taking the Knight Center “Mental health and journalism: How journalists can responsibly report on it and take care of themselves” course. I told instructor Mar Cabra that exemplifying the way you did with Taylor Lorenz to illustrate the issue of online harassment of female journalists was a bad idea, it was not a good example. I did not anticipate that she would share my point of view with you and that you would kindly respond by referring to the article “Gender-based online violence spikes after prominent media attacks” published by Brookings.
I am very grateful to Mar for taking my question so seriously in order to share my question with you, but since I do not agree with your answer, I am writing directly to you, so as not to distract her from her main activity in the course, which is not that of being an intermediary between an interviewee and a student.
TAYLOR LORENZ
I'm aware of that article that you mention, but I'm sorry, in my point of view it's not directly related to the issue I raised, which is Taylor Lorenz's recurrent unethical conduct. I gave a very specific recent example of that behavior, with that reporter fabricating contacts with sources that she didn't really seek out until it came to light because those sources protested and made it public.
Neither in the article nor in the publications to which it links:
“Gender-Based Violence Online”, by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency.
“The Chilling: Global Trends in Online Violence Against Women Journalists”, the research discussion paper by the team led by Julie Posetti.
https://en.unesco.org/sites/default/files/the-chilling.pdf
is there any argument that justifies the behavior of Taylor Lorenz that I have indicated.
https://www.thewrap.com/washington-post-taylor-lorenz-column-youtubers/
The article you recommend covers two different episodes with Taylor Lorenz involving Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Pulitzer winner Glenn Greenwald. The episode I mentioned involves the distorted portrait by her of the YouTubers covering the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial.
And the ethical transgression that implies lying by publishing having contacted someone when in reality that never happened.
I repeat, the article in no way justifies Lorenz's behavior in that episode, which is not the only antithetical one in which she has been involved. I suppose you, Miss Hoffman, do not personally justify these embarrassing episodes either.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wEACP11J34
What makes the implicit premise of the article you refer to even more problematic, to the effect that it is forbidden for “prominent male media figures” to call out someone like Taylor Lorenz because she would otherwise be harassed, is that she is a reporter who works for powerful platforms like the New York Times and now the Washington Post. She is not just any reporter. Therefore, it is intended to protect those who belong to an already privileged group that claims to be above criticism and even repudiation, justified or not.
I read at “The Chilling”:
Our participants also revealed an alarming trend involving male journalists from competing news organisations and fringe blogs, especially those from the edges of the political spectrum, ‘dogpiling’ specific women journalists. Eight percent (8%) of our survey respondents identified “staff of rival news organisations’’ among their regular abusers. This was a particularly noticeable pattern in the US and the UK, with multiple interviewees being subjected to gaslighting attacks from male journalists and commentators featuring pernicious sexism and misogyny.
This behaviour is identifiable as part of a pattern whereby certain influential male journalists trigger or amplify abuse by signalling (e.g., through sharing a tweet from the targeted journalist with critical annotations) to their followers to join the attack on a woman journalist.
Niche sites and partisan news media outlets then respond to these cues through blogs, columns or TV segments - both amplifying the abuse and delivering new participants to the ‘pile-on’ brigade. In some cases, the attack is then “laundered” or legitimised by mainstream media actors. This type of coordinated online assault on a woman journalist sometimes includes pressuring her employer to sack her. New York Times technology reporter Taylor Lorenz is a regular target of such campaigns across multiple platforms:
“My frustration and anger with all of this is I actually don’t even care about death threats anymore. I’ve had so many people tell me they’re going to come rape me and murder me.
I’m kind of immune to them by now. But what I really care about is the reputational harm...
.
Their ultimate goal is to make you seem difficult in some way... They wrote a whole story where it implies that I rape children. It’s insane. But smears like that hurt my credibility in the eyes of the public... And let’s also talk about how the right-wing media amplifies all of it... you would not believe how famous they’ve made me in that ecosystem.”
But neither Tucker Carlson nor Glenn Greenwald called their followers to attack Taylor Lorenz.
In fact, for instance, the interaction between Glenn Greenwald and Taylor Lorenz is being misrepresented. She was the one who targeted him, attacking him first, with a tweet saying that a "legitimate journalist" would never make a deal with Rumble like Greenwald did. He put the screenshot of it in his tweet. So, in effect, asking Greenwald not to respond to Lorenz is silencing him.
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1425915345995436040
VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
But the most questionable case of the three that the article handles is that of Virginia Heffernan.
Strangely, the link to that case is broken.
https://video.foxnews.com/v/6230362987001#sp=show-clips
So I did some research and found out that it all started from a column Heffernan published in the Los Angeles Times, “What can you do about the Trumpites next door?”:
https://news.yahoo.com/column-trumpites-next-door-110012354.html
It's a divisive column that recounts how neighbors shovel snow off her house, and she has the moral dilemma of thanking them despite being supporters of Trump, whom she compares to Nazis.
The Daily Mail covered the reactions, including by Megyn Kelly:
So, sorry, all the three episodes it seems like politically motivated and politically driven exchange of aggression. And I am not willing to be manipulated, by one side or the other.
CHLOE MELAS
But let me explain briefly why I'm skeptical of people like Taylor Lorenz's. Why I don't buy that they are real victims.
In 2018, I published an investigation that proved that a CNN Entertainment reporter based in New York City, Chloe Melas, has been fabricated a #MeToo story on Hollywood star Morgan Freeman. I published that piece in Spanish at the Gabriel García Márquez Journalism Foundation website.
At the time, CNN claimed that Melas had received death threats. Supposedly from Morgan Freeman fans.
It wasn't until Spain's second national newspaper, El Mundo, picked it up and spread it to a mass audience that it gained traction. It hit strong, and around 70 outlets across the Spanish-language media cover it. And what CNN did? They refute me proving I was wrong? Ignored me because I never was in their radar?
No, they pressure El Mundo to delete viral tweets that spread their story about my investigation.
And then, already on the American continent, they pressured a Peruvian newspaper, La República, to publish an anonymous attack against me, with statements from an anonymous source "from CNN" saying that what I had published were falsehoods. Behind the anonymity the CNN spokesperson for Latin America, Mariana Pinango, was hiding.
And after the fraud against Morgan Freeman Melas dedicated herself to promoting a narrative that would justify the abusive conservatorship to which Britney Spears was subjected.
She was accused by many in the #FreeBritney movement of being in the payroll of Britney Spears' father.
Chloe Melas met with four activists from the movement to supposedly interview them for the documentary that CNN was preparing on the conservatorship. But in the end, under a ridiculous excuse, the material was not included and was buried, but the activists recorded it and shows the ignorance and unethical bad faith of Chloe Melas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwDuARRYt48
And she starts by claiming she and her family are receiving death threats. Pure BS to distract and not be accountable.
I have challenged CNN to sue me if I "defamed" Chloe Melas. And I take every opportunity I get to put her on display and talk about how disgusting and corrupt she is, and I don't regret it. And I even wrote CNN's attorney Ted Boutros, member of the IWMF’s Advisory Council, about it.
So, from my experience with Chloe Melas, I know firsthand that there are female reporters who pretend to be attacked and are nothing more than corrupt phonies playing the victim.
I respectfully suggest that someone like you, Miss Hoffman, be more critical or less partisan in supporting those like Taylor Lorenz and Chloe Melas just for being female reporters, rather than for being honest and righteous.
Regards,
Tomoo Terada
As I mention them I address
Megan Brown, Zeve Sanderson, from CSMaP
Maria Alejandra Silva Ortega, from IWMF.
Julie Posetti, from ICFJ.
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Me gusta la buena conversación, sea personal o en línea, pero borraré sin contemplaciones cualquier insulto. Cuando he criticado a alguien siempre he mostrado las razones para hacerlo. Y jamás me he ocultado en el anonimato, como hacen muchos en línea.