Taylor Lorenz says she has "severe PTSD" from being a journalist

Is it a crime story?

The Post at first thought it was fine and then changed its mind.

 

It's a bit more than that.

 

This far reaching effort by the right to categorize all sympathy and empathy and unity with the LGBTQi community as groomers is deeply troubling

 

Whether it’s Libs of TikTok, Project Veritas, Breitbart or anyone else, it’s been my experience that whenever someone on the right tries to use a video of someone’s “own words!” as some sort of gotcha, it’s been taken out of context, distorted or otherwise misrepresented.

The problem I have here is that the targets are ordinary people who have done nothing wrong and they’re losing their jobs and being threatened with violence.

One of these days, someone will get killed.

But I guess that’s just a part of the game these days.

 

Is that the standard? A "crime story"?

How about a "slander story"? A "libel story"? A"defamation story"?

Or an "I got these teachers fired story"?

That said, I'm on the fence about linking to a public document on a government website as a means of confirming this Tweeter's identity.

 

Also, the accompanying reactionary dysinformation campaign is well underway.

 

Best way to counter that is to mock the right for using 1950s stereotypes.

 

I’m speaking of course about the Post’s willingness to link said document, then edit out the link, then say it shared no personal details despite the brief presence of a link.

Not the decision to give the person’s identity at all.

 

And then, of course, there’s this, and this isn’t nothing. If you’re going to reveal the identity of an account, maybe be damn sure who it is not, and shield that person’s Instagram account accordingly.


https://forward.com/news/500292/online-mob-cyberbullying-wrong-chaya-raichik-libs-of-tiktok/?amp=1

Before Sunday night, the Chaya Raichik mistaken for the right-wing activist had never heard of Libs of TikTok. But when she turned on her phone for the first time after the two-day Passover holiday, she had urgent messages awaiting her from Post reporter Lorenz, asking Raichik to confirm she had created it.

She was caught off-guard.

“I had no idea what she was talking about,” Raichik said. “I called a friend and I said, Have you ever heard of this account?”

Then she figured it was probably a relative of hers that she’d never met. Her father was one of 10 siblings, and many of his siblings had large families, too. Libs of TikTok Chaya Raichik might have been a second-cousin, or more distant than that. But, she told Lorenz, it wasn’t her.

“She kept pushing, and I just said, you know, please just leave me alone,” Raichik recalled. “It is not me. You have the wrong Chaya.”

On Monday, with her kids at Universal Studios, she received a frantic call from her mother, saying Lorenz was at their front door asking if her daughter had participated in the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection. This Raichik had never been to Washington, D.C.

 

When have you gone to a person's house to do an interview for a story? What were the circumstances?

What is your organization's policy about going to someone's home, especially without arranging it advance?

The only time I went to someone's house for a story was interviewing a high school football coach for a season preview.

 

I do it all the time for features. We have a bi-monthly magazine that we publish in addition to the paper and I'm usually tasked with one feature for it. It's often the type of story that benefits from a long-form interview and pictures that are better taken at their house because of the subject matter.
I also had a football coach who told me to come to his house after a game. I was leaving one game, he'd already left his, and his house was on my way back to the office so if I had a few extra minutes on deadline it was easier to stop in for 10 minutes and get everything I needed.

As far as an ambush interview like this, though? Only done it once.
We had an old football coach who decided he'd had enough of this shit and turned in his letter of resignation at 10 a.m. on a Friday. His team had a road game at 7 p.m. We got word of it around 1 or 2 p.m. I tried calling him several times and got no answer. A couple of times I zoned out, expecting the machine to pick up, and it must have rang 20 times before I gave up.
One of our news reporters was his neighbor, and when he left for the day around 4 I asked him to call if he saw the guy was home. The coach was at home and it was almost time for me to leave to cover the game, so with no time left I went to his house and knocked on his door. He answered and we did the interview.
His first words to me, though, were, "Why did you let that damn phone ring so long!?"

 

Seriously?

Happens daily in our newsroom.