How a Conservative Backlash Silenced #Ferguson Reporters for All the Wrong Reasons
On August 15, after the killing of Ferguson, Missouri teen Michael Brown had surged into the national consciousness, the Washington Post’s DeNeen L. Brown filed a story from a town up the road. There were “dark blue undercover police cars parked outside the house of Darren Wilson.” That house was located on “Manda Lane in Crestwood.” On August 16, the same details appeared in a story co-bylined by Brown, Jerry Markon, and Wesley Lowery. “Dark blue undercover police cars were parked outside his house on Manda Lane,” they wrote. Both stories made it clear that Wilson, the officer who killed Brown, had taken himself elsewhere.
On November 24, after a grand jury opted not to indict Wilson, the New York Times ran a story by Julie Bosman and Campbell Robertson about how the police officer had “quietly” gotten married while avoiding the press. Wilson and his wife owned a home “on Manda Lane in Crestwood.” The detail was included near the end of a story that briefly included an image of the couple’s marriage license. (It included the address of a law firm, but not Wilson’s address.)
What had been innocuous information became the kindling for a media bonfire. They attracted the attention Charles C. Johnson, the conservative journalist whose previous social media interactions include: tweeting call-in details that allowed activists to crash a Thad Cochran presser; tweeting the name of the Dallas “Ebola nurse” before big news outlets decided to reveal it; and reporting that ABC News paid “mid-to-high six figures” for an interview with Darren Wilson. When both ABC News and Wilson himself denied the claim, Johnson stuck by his “NBC source with knowledge” and suggested that ABC might have made a “backroom deal” as it did to interview Casey Anthony.
The upshot of Johnson’s stories is that the media can’t be trusted. The aftermath of the “Manda Lane” story is a harassment campaign against two reporters who, in the view of conservative readers, risked the life of Darren Wilson. On the right, the story of #Ferguson is that a vile and biased media inflated a simple case of self-defense into a bogus “racism” story. In this storyline, Wilson is the real victim, and his aggressors need to be shamed out of their jobs and comfort.
“The New York Times, whether consciously or not, has just endangered Darren Wilson’s life,” wrote Fox News media reporter Howard Kurtz. “I mean, why not add a locator map?” On November 25, Johnson published a story at his independent GotNews website with the headline “Why Can’t We Publish Addresses Of New York Times Reporters?” Spoiler: He didn’t agree with that headline.
“It would be wrong, for example, to publish Bosman’s address,” wrote Johnson, publishing the reporter’s address. “It would be similarly wrong to publish the address of Robertson, too.” Ditto. “So why do journalists think they are beyond examination?”
What followed was a crowdsourced campaign of trolling that succeeded in quieting Bosman and Robertson. Neither reporter has tweeted since November 25. Robertson, whom I met this year covering a story in Louisiana, has taken steps to remove his family from any possible threats. A simple Twitter search reveals dozens of people tweeting at the reporters, at the rate of about one per hour, spreading their addresses. While liberal Twitter was pummeling a GOP staffer who’d written an ill-advised criticism of the First Daughters, elements of conservative Twitter were attacking the Times reporters.
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2014-12-01/how-a-conservative-backlash-quieted-ferguson-reporters-for-all-the-wrong-reasons
And this was the same day the Daily Caller had their big "expose" trying to figure out if Wesley Lowery was black...Because, you know, he's light enough to be part white, and if he has a white parent his upbringing was too privileged and clean to report about the bottom-feeding scum in the ghetto, and since he's part white, he's "above" them anyway, or something...
And no, I am not linking to it 