Washington Post reporter’s controversial race tweets raise questions

The 24-year-old Post reporter gained prominence with his reporting on the ground in Ferguson, Mo., but his confrontational tweets about race are of a sort that has gotten other reporters in hot water and even fired.

Lowery’s reporting has not been called into question, but his social media antics have rubbed some of his colleagues within the newsroom the wrong way, according to a Post source who declined to be identified. The source said that a few years ago, Lowery would have been removed from reporting on Ferguson after “becoming part of the story” when he was detained by local police for failing to leave a fast food restaurant when authorities ordered him out.

Lowery, who is mixed race, joined the post in February 2014, according to his LinkedIn profile. Six months later, news broke that an 18-year-old black man named Michael Brown was shot dead by Darren Wilson, a white police officer who claimed to have acted in self-defense. Lowery swooped into Ferguson to begin reporting on the racially-charged aftermath.

Though Lowery is a news reporter with previous stints at the Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times, he has a history of airing his opinions, particularly on race.

“Until a 17-year-old black boy can walk to any store in America to buy Skittles [without] being gunned down, we can’t stop talking [about] race,” Lowery tweeted in March 2012, using a reference to the shooting death of Trayvon Martin. (Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman, was acquitted of murder charges.)

But more recently, in light of the incident in Ferguson, Lowery’s tweets have taken on an accusatory tone toward media outlets and news personalities he deems insufficiently sensitive on race issues. He has come close to charging his peers with full-on racism.

“Bro, black people don’t work for Politico,” Lowery said to one person on Twitter who had joked that Lowery might have applied to work at the Arlington, Va.-based news outlet.

The comment set off a firestorm among other politics reporters, with some finding it offensive to suggest that black people are either excluded from Politico or don’t want to work there.

Politico has a diverse staff in terms of race and gender. But as is the case in most newsrooms, it has few black reporters.

After Lowery was detained by police in Ferguson, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough accused Lowery of trying to “get on TV.”

A feud was born, and Lowery fired off a racially-tinged tweet at Scarborough.

“Joe Scarborough sets out to teach you silly black people a thing or two about Rosa Parks,” Lowery wrote on Twitter last December. The tweet included a link to a blog post by Scarborough that contrasted Civil Rights protests of the 1950s and 1960s to protests in Ferguson, which were often violent.

In another tweet related to Ferguson, Lowery cited his own life experience. “As a black man in America, it didn’t take this case or these protests for me to know racial profiling [by police] existed.”

The comments are aggressive but popular among Lowery’s 112,000 followers. The tweets are often shared hundreds of times.

They also appear to violate the Post’s social media guidelines for its reporters.

“Post journalists must refrain from writing, tweeting or posting anything — including photographs or video — that could be perceived as reflecting political, racial, sexist, religious or other bias or favoritism,” read the Post’s social media guidelines for the paper’s reporters. “When posting content online, ask yourself: Would this posting make a reader question my ability to do my job objectively and professionally (whether you are a reporter, an editor, a developer or a producer)? If so, don’t post it.”

In a conversation with the Washington Examiner media desk, Lowery defended himself.

“Well, in the Scarborough tweet, I was criticizing his tone in his [blog] piece, not [the] content or weighing in with one specific opinion or another,” Lowery said. “In that second tweet, I stated that racial profiling exists. Almost any reasonable person (and analytical and anecdotal evidence) would agree.”

Lowery’s tweets gained attention from some media watchers who say the comments compromise the perception that he’s an impartial reporter on the subject of race.

In past tweets, Lowery suggested racial ignorance or bias on behalf of the New York Times and CNN.

“Shorter [New York Times]: We totally care about black people (but yeah, we did kind of ignore that murdered black 17-year-old),” Lowery tweeted in April of 2013, commenting on lack of coverage the Times dedicated to a 17-year-old black boy in New York.

“Lots of white faces,” Lowery tweeted, also in April of 2013, about a new promotional CNN ad that featured photos of some of the networks’ on-air talent. There were no black people in the photo (CNN does have at least one black anchor: Don Lemon) but there were photos of Christiane Amanpour, who has Iranian roots; Sanjay Gupta, an Indian-American; and Fareed Zakaria, who is Indian.

Betsy Rothstein, a media blogger at The Daily Caller, frequently criticizes Lowery, often referring to him as an “activist.”

“Wesley Lowery is more a protest organizer than a reporter,” she said. “If you critique his Ferguson coverage, you are a racist. And I’d imagine the Washington Post’s top brass can’t be too happy with him calling people racist on Twitter. Everyone knows Wesley is way too out of control for The Washington Post. I feel sorry for his editors.”

Asked if he’s been approached by his editors or Washington Post management about his Twitter activity, Lowery said, “I was not approached by Post management about either of those tweets, nor ever about tweets about my personal experiences or background.”He said, though, that there are “ongoing conversations about [news] coverage and what that looks like across various platforms, including twitter.”

Other journalists have had a different experience than Lowery.

In 2012, then-Politico campaign reporter David Catanese was pulled by his editors from covering a U.S. Senate race in Missouri after he used his Twitter account to weigh in on a brewing controversy.

The controversy centered on former Rep. Todd Akin, R-Mo., who suggested that pregnancies do not occur from “legitimate rape.”

“Poor phrasing, but if you watch the [interview] Todd Akin meant to convey that there’s less chance of getting pregnant if raped,” Catanese tweeted at the time.

Politico’s top editors emailed the staff, according to the Washington Post, explaining the decision to reassign Catanese.

“Dave’s tweets on Akin created a distraction to his own work, and to the newsroom as a whole,” the memo said. “They also made himself part of the story, requiring us for now to remove him from Akin coverage.”

Catanese left Politico shortly thereafter.

Longtime CNN correspondent Jim Clancy was fired in January after a series of tweets deemed offensive by Jewish advocacy groups.

The mix of reporters and other social media has fostered a new atmosphere that blurs lines between news reporting and opinion, said Nikki Usher, an assistant journalism professor at George Washington University and author of Making News at the New York Times.

“Because journalists cover beats so closely and it’s what they live and breathe and they have an audience that now follows them online, what happens is they feel pressure to offer constant updates from the field,” she said. “What ends up happening is it becomes really easy to let your opinions of coverage or of what’s happening slip through because you’re covering every moment, trying to be competitive, and that’s naturally going to involve some unfiltered observations.”

Andrew Alexander, a journalism professor at Ohio University and a former Ombudsman for the Post, said Lowery is a good reporter. He declined to comment on Lowery’s tweets, since he hasn’t followed them closely, but he did say they may raise questions.

“I think a question would be, was Wes Lowery commenting on something he is covering,” Alexander said. “Or, is he making a broad commentary because he has an expertise on race and he’s weighing on an ancillary squabble?”

He also said newsrooms tend to offer mixed signals on what they expect from their reporters’ online behavior. “On the one hand, they are being encouraged to use social media and have what their bosses call ‘voice,'” Alexander said. “At the same time, they’re being told to be unbiased. It’s often difficult to know where that line is.”

Asked if the Post has relaxed on its social media guidelines for journalists, a Post spokeswoman simply replied with a link to the guidelines.

This story was first published at 5:00 a.m. and has been updated.