“They want someone to knock on your door, too. Not to put you in the newspaper, though”

Very good blog by Parene about why various MAGA types are pretending to believe that Taylor Lorenz knocking on someone’s door is some kind of unprecedented act of harassment rather than journalism 101:

On Tuesday, Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz published a story about a repulsive creep who uses her large online following to, essentially, subject random LGBTQ people (and especially trans people) to harassment, and worse. The piece is meant to help explain who is behind the right’s furious anti-trans moral panic, how the right’s propaganda machine finds the “main characters” that help stoke that moral panic, and how this creep used that propaganda machine to grow the following that now helps provide her with new people to feed into the meat grinder. 

So, naturally, much of the Twitter debate about the story was about Media Ethics, because Lorenz knocked on the creep’s door.

[…]

If you are attempting to persuade this creep’s defenders, specifically, and not a general audience, that what Lorenz did was ethical, and that the creep’s identity is newsworthy, you have made a category error. These people on this ascendant right don’t just have different ideas about the role and function of journalism; they don’t just believe journalists are biased liberals; they don’t just believe the media is too hostile to conservatives; they are hostile to the concept of journalism itself. As in, uncovering things dutifully and carefully and attempting to convey your findings to the public honestly. They don’t want that and don’t like it and are endeavoring to end it as a common practice. You are debating logic and facts with frothing bigots with a bone-deep opposition to your entire project.

This new right fundamentally doesn’t want “newsgathering” to happen. They want a chaotic information stream of unverifiable bullshit and context collapse and propaganda. Their backers, the people behind the whole project, are philosophically and materially opposed to the idea that true things should be uncovered and verified and disseminated publicly about, well, them, and their projects. This may have started as a politically opportunistic war against particular outlets and stories, but it has quickly blossomed into a worldview. It’s an ideologically coherent opposition to the liberal precepts of verifiability and transparency, and the holders of those precepts are too invested in them to understand what their enemy is doing. The creep’s account, everyone in the press should understand, is the model for what they will be replaced with.

Exactly right. And the idea that Libs of Tik Tok was just some private, random meme account rather that a major part of the wave of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation is equally intelligence insulting. If she is not a figure of public interest I don’t know who would be.

Sometimes, it can be hard to determine when someone has crossed the line into being a figure of genuine public interest. "Libs of Tik Tok" is not an even remotely close case, and Glenn would not be arguing otherwise if she was collaborating with Democrats. https://t.co/5tnbeJif22— Scott Lemieux (@LemieuxLGM) April 20, 2022