Something is seriously wrong with the Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz.
The TikTok correspondent took a break last week from harassing anonymous Twitter users to tell a weirdly blatant and easily disproven lie regarding the Drudge Report.
To wit, Lorenz claimed in a series of since-deleted tweets that a Drudge Report “editor” had been “calling and texting … relentlessly for the past couple of weeks.” She also claimed the supposed editor got a hold of her “personal cellphone number” and “yelled at me when I asked him to leave me alone and said he would ‘blast my name all over Drudge Report until it ruins my career.’”
Drudge Report founder Matt Drudge investigated her allegation. He claimed he found no evidence to back her story, saying in a comment to CNN he “never contacted her, nor has anyone associated with the Drudge Report.”
Drudge also sent Lorenz an email demanding a retraction.
Following his email, Lorenz deleted her tweets.
“For anyone who saw my post [about] this man claiming to be from Drudge calling me nonstop,” Lorenz said in a new tweet thread, “good news: I heard from Matt Drudge & this man has zero power over Drudge! He’s claiming to be an editor all over the internet but he’s not. Sorry to disappoint everyone saying Drudge is based.”
Even weirder, Lorenz told CNN her now-deleted tweets were a “joke,” explaining she found it “hilarious” that anyone connected to the Drudge Report would attempt to damage her career.
“[I was] laughing very hard about the idea,” she said, adding she was merely “joking” when she wrote the now-deleted tweets.
“I am happy to correct the record that I have no drama with Drudge Report,” Lorenz said.
What on Earth?
Any decent journalist would’ve vetted and verified the identity of the supposed Drudge editor before taking the harassment claim public. That Lorenz failed to take even this basic step, despite being a self-described leader in online and tech reporting, is simply inexcusable.
In other words, Lorenz is either a terrible journalist or a terrible liar. Or both!
Advocacy for journalism
Planned Parenthood Senior Director of News Content Kate Smith was apoplectic last week following the leak of a draft Supreme Court majority opinion overturning Roe v. Wade.
The funny thing is: Smith’s outburst was nearly indistinguishable from how she covered “abortion access” when she role-played as a straight news reporter for CBS News.
“A big, hearty ‘f*** you’ to everyone who said I was overreacting by saying this could happen,” she wailed on social media. “We weren’t overreacting, we were reacting to what they were telling us they were going to do.”
Smith, who, again, played the part of straight news reporter before joining Planned Parenthood’s payroll, added, “This isn’t a ‘told ya so’ tweet. This is a ‘you better listen when I tell you that birth control and virtually everything else is next’ tweet.”
She concluded, “[Supreme Court Justice] Amy Coney Barrett refused to say whether she thought IVF was constitutional during her confirmation hearings. She refused to say whether Griswold v CT was correctly decided. These aren’t hypotheticals. Your rights are on the line. NOW.”
For context, Smith served as a supposedly objective journalist during Barrett’s confirmation hearings, in case you have questions regarding the impartiality of her coverage.
Speaking of which, her “abortion access” coverage was anything but impartial during the three years she drew a paycheck from CBS News. In fact, her hamfisted, all-too-obviously-partisan coverage was something of a running gag in right-leaning circles.
But, hey! At least now she can drop the whole “journalism” charade, which I’m sure must have been exhausting. Smith is free now to be who she always was, relying no longer on CBS News to serve as a middleman for her political advocacy. These days, Smith draws her salary directly from the industry she promoted and defended so zealously while play-pretending as a journalist.
The work is no different. She doesn’t have to worry any longer about dressing up her public statements.
Ignoring the obvious
The press had a lot to say last week following the leak of a majority Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade.
Curiously absent, however, from basically all newsroom discussion regarding the draft decision was an examination of whether Roe as it was decided in 1973 was good jurisprudence (it wasn’t). You’d think a national debate regarding the Supreme Court possibly overturning a previous decision would merit at least some discussion regarding whether said previous decision was good law.
But then you’d be very wrong!
“What we have seen is women will go through whatever hurdle,” said ABC News Congressional Correspondent Rachel Scott, “whatever length necessary in order to have a choice, including traveling hundreds of miles out of state. They are — right now, we are seeing abortion deserts sort of sweep across the middle part of the country, and what abortion providers fear most is for the women who do not have the option, who do not have the means to travel hundreds of miles.”
Said CNN’s Don Lemon in reference to whether overturning Roe would lead to the overturning of other Supreme Court decisions, “It’s a slippery slope.”
“Why,” he continued, “is the Second Amendment sacrosanct, [but] Roe v. Wade is not?”
NBC News’s Yamiche Alcindor added elsewhere, ”This is really going to be a regional problem, and some women who, again, have very little means, they would be forced to drive 10, 12, 13 hours to other states, even as far as Maryland or Illinois. So, really, a real problem here, a lot of concern here.”
She added, “One of only three abortion providers in [Louisiana] and, like, the only abortion clinic in Mississippi, where I was yesterday, this is an abortion clinic still operational, but there’s worry about how long that’s going to last, and I just spoke to the administrator of this clinic who said she’s losing sleep, not sleeping well at all, thinking about the women who would lose access to abortion if this clinic was shut down.”
At MSNBC, legal analyst Neal Katyal said, “Honestly, I want to cry. I want to cry in so many ways.”
Yes, Mr. Legal Analyst, but is Roe bad jurisprudence? Is overturning the decision wise or unwise, legally speaking? Is it justified? Is there a legal precedent? If not, why not?
Who knows! Can’t talk now! Crying too hard.
