It was a month ago that Taylor Lorenz, the New York Times’ digital reporter, was leaving to open a Washington Post office. This had the feeling of a sports team that had just managed to get rid of a player who was not performing well under contract. There were many questions about The Post’s appeal, given Lorenz’s history of being deeply sociopathic. Jim Thompson gave a list of some of the disturbing examples she provided.
It turns out that the reporter and the paper are very much in love. WaPo has been unsure about its support for Lorenz and her article since Tuesday’s report. The paper does not support Lorenz’s work, and it supports her doxxing someone who makes the leftists look silly. However, it has changed its approach many times to preserve journalistic propriety.
Let me show you how disoriented the paper is about this by laying out the sequence of dispatches I received from The Post. This is not a complicated plot, but it will highlight how obvious the dysfunction is in this entire report.
First, this segment was included in the original article, which was posted Tuesday morning. It is linked to the professional as well as the personal contact information of the woman who runs LOTT.
This was the way @WashingtonPost initially posted its story doxxing the backer of @LibsofTikTok: pic.twitter.com/o3z887IOYH
— Lie-Able Sources (@LieAbleSources) April 21, 2022
WaPo then decided to remove the link to the personal data it had supplied at some time during the day.
After a significant amount of blowback, later in the day the link to the private information was gone. No correction was issued, and mention was made of the removal. pic.twitter.com/ayoQ8wPxLL
— Lie-Able Sources (@LieAbleSources) April 21, 2022
The management then issued an official statement, standing by Taylor Lorenz’s work. There should have been warning signs that they felt the need for a comment. The boilerplate support that Taylor received was laughable, praising her reporting skills and calling Taylor a skilled reporter. They also claimed that they never had linked to the personal data of the account holder.
Statement from @cameronbarr re: reporting from @TaylorLorenz pic.twitter.com/RsGw950t78
— Kristine Coratti Kelly (@kriscoratti) April 19, 2022
Joseph Wulsohn, Fox News’s reporter, contacted a spokesperson for the paper. Their story is that although they had posted the information as a link, it was removed because the details were not relevant to the article.
WaPo faced intense backlash for initially including a hyperlink that revealed Libs of TikTok’s employer, professional info as well as an address, which has been referred to as her home address.
The hyperlink was later scrubbed from the report following backlash. 2/
— Joseph A. Wulfsohn (@JosephWulfsohn) April 20, 2022
This timeline is terrible for any news outlet, even if it’s an allegedly top-tier source of journalism like WaPo. This is how it turned out:
- It doxxed a woman
- Removed her details
- Gave official word it never doxxed her
- Confirmed it had doxxed her
- Declared the information as public and non-essential
In just two days, they have held five positions on their story. All the while insisting that their reporting was sound and valid.
Their statement that they knew that their personal information was public and not critical to the article is a complete rebuke of the Lorenz article. This article was intended to expose the management of Libs of Tik Tok. To now say that these personal details are not relevant to the article raises a new question: What was the purpose of the article?
Some journalists have defended Lorenz, like Alex Thompson of Politico. This suggests that she was practicing old-fashioned gritty journalism. It’s hilarious to try to raise Taylor Lorenz to the level of Woodward or Bernstein. She wasn’t trying to uncover a deep governmental conspiracy. Instead, she was just trying to doxx someone she disagrees with on Twitter. This was not Watergate 3.0. It was the petty work of an online troll.
Woodward and Bernstein used door-knocker interrogation to piece together a complicated puzzle that involved dozens of people in a scandal that had many moving parts. They had to use impromptu face-to-face meetings to get any information from witnesses. People were not forthcoming on the phone. Taylor Lorenz harassed family members of someone she felt was sending out hateful tweets.
This is her entire “reporting” and it is completely undermined by the new measure that the information reported was only public information. This is not good old-fashioned muckraking. Two days later, her paper reassessed the information she had gathered. But, the Washington Post is still behind Lorenz’s article.
All the evidence shown here over the last few days shows that Taylor Lorenz has found the right home for her journalism.
