In one of the most shameful, egregious media failures of the year, a Trump appointee to the Department of Labor was forced to resign after a Bloomberg reporter started asking officials about a Facebook post spun as anti-Semitic, even though it was a clearly satirical post mocking the alt-right.
Earlier this morning, Bloomberg reporter Ben Penn proudly tweeted out a “scoop” about Leif Olson, who recently started as an adviser in the department’s Wage and Hour Division:
SCOOP: Trump Labor Department’s new sr adviser Leif Olson posted on Facebook that Jewish media “protect their own.” In response to my request for comment on Olson’s anti-Semitic post, @USDOL says they’ve accepted his resignation. https://t.co/68kDvaFn0h
— Ben Penn (@benjaminpenn) September 3, 2019
In reality, the Facebook post in question was the opposite of anti-Semitic. It was a clearly sarcastic post from 2016 about Paul Ryan crushing alt-right challenger Paul Nehlen. If the over-the-top language isn’t a tip off, it’s a fairly dead giveaway that Olson refers to Ryan having “suffered a massive, historic, emasculating 70-point victory.”
When one of the commenters suggests Ryan must be a “neocon” and a Jew, Olson, clearly joking, responded, “It must be true because I’ve never heard the Lamestream Media report it, and you know they protect their own.”
And yet Bloomberg used this to tear him down. Ted Frank, a lawyer and friend of Olson (who happens to be Jewish), has a Twitter thread on this disgrace. Frank also notes that “a good man who just moved his family from Texas to engage in public service has his life disrupted.” Even liberal Jonathan Chait, no fan of the Trump administration, acknowledged this was “terribly unfair.”
What’s particularly amazing is that Penn, the reporter on the story, is showing no remorse, defending his article as merely having asked questions to the department about it. But he is clearly still stating as a matter of fact that Olson was engaging in anti-Semitism, writing, “This is the latest in a series of mishaps under the Trump administration personnel vetting system. What makes this one remarkable is that Olson’s Facebook page was public to his nonfriends. Any cursory screening of his social media accounts could’ve uncovered the anti-Semitism.”
This is a shameful episode in media bias, no doubt, but the Trump administration shares some of the blame here too. For all of Trump’s attacks on the media and tendency to be unapologetic about his own remarks, Olson was largely hung out to dry here. They could have stood by him, fought back by saying that it was clearly sarcastic. Instead, they let somebody be smeared and lose his job and have his life disrupted based on a sick lie.
