We need to figure out when criticizing a journalist is harassment, according to the New York Times’s news page, and when it’s fighting against harassment.
Times writer Taylor Lorenz used International Women’s Day to claim that online harassment “destroyed” her life. Fox News host Tucker Carlson aired an opinion segment criticizing this claim. That criticism, it turns out, also counts as “harassment” of Lorenz, she argued. Why? Mainly because the cable news host used her full name and headshot.
Here’s why it’s confusing. Firstly, Lorenz has spent her career outing pseudonymous social media users for having connections to bad politics, and smearing people for things they didn’t say in conversations she wasn’t allowed to be in.
Second, Lorenz doesn’t seem to live by her “don’t criticize journalists by name” standard.
Following Lorenz’s rules, she has personally “incited harassment” of me, a clear attempt to “destroy” my life.
Wow, using my full name — clearly this is an incitement to harassment! That’s how the perennial victim complex works, right? pic.twitter.com/8wQnzDD1TG
— Tiana Lowe (@TianaTheFirst) March 11, 2021
And if Carlson is sexist for targeting Lorenz — and that’s what she actually believes — then is it not a little racist and, in fact, dangerous for a 36-year-old Times star to put a target on the back of an Asian American woman more than a decade younger than her, and with far fewer Twitter followers? Consider the recent rash of hate crime attacks against Asian Americans.
Of course, I don’t believe this victim talk for a second. That standard, her standard, is ridiculous and infantilizing. Carlson has every right to criticize another journalist, particularly one with such a high profile who works at the paper of record. He is just doing his job as a media critic. It isn’t an incitement to harassment, nor is it racism nor sexism just to name her or me in a critical way. Nobody here is a victim of anything.
Online harassment is terrible. I’ve experienced my fair share. In this toxic social media environment, which Lorenz has done so much to make worse, anyone who participates in public life or public debate accepts that it comes with the territory.
I wish we had a less broken society, but amid a pandemic that’s killed half a million people in the United States and left even more impoverished, none of us, working comfortably from home, can claim victimhood because of some pathetic keyboard warriors. And certainly none of us can call criticism of our work out of bounds because of how some idiots react.
