Have a strong or even obnoxious comment you want to share on social media?
Watch out.
Someone from the Washington Post may call your parents.
This happened this week to Scott McMillan, a 56-year-old private citizen who serves as an attorney in California.
On March 22, an anti-Trump “resistance” lunatic with more than 400,000 social media followers tweeted, “Trump cares about the Dow Jones Industrial Average and his re-election chances more than he cares about the lives of the American people.”
McMillan, who at the time had a little more than 100 followers, responded in a since-deleted tweet: “The fundamental problem is whether we are going to tank the entire economy to save 2.5% of the population which is (1) generally expensive to maintain, and (2) not productive.”
It was not long before other Twitter users jumped on the attorney, whose timeline is filled with conservative and Republican commentary, “ratio’ing” his bad tweet with hundreds of angry responses.
Nothing about this episode is particularly newsworthy, by the way. This sort of thing happens all the time on social media. When someone says something stupid or controversial, there is usually a small army of people ready to tell him so. True, some social media dogpiles are worse than others because there is no rhyme or reason to the internet’s two minutes of hate. But this McMillan story is especially uninteresting given he is just a guy with no major following who tweeted a nonviral take.
It should end there, but it does not.
The Post escalated the issue this week by contacting both McMillan and his parents to report on his deleted tweet. The “democracy dies in darkness” paper calling up a random guy and his parents over a tweet is not as bad as the time CNN hunted down and confronted a Florida woman whom its reporters accused of unwittingly coordinating with Kremlin-connected trolls by promoting a pro-Trump Facebook page. But it is definitely in the same ballpark.
“Scott McMillan, a 56-year-old lawyer,” Post senior editor Marc Fisher wrote Tuesday in promotion of his story, “tweeted that it’s more vital to revive the economy than to save people who are ‘not productive,’ like the elderly and infirm. So I called his parents.”
This really happened.
The accompanying Post headline reads, “He urged saving the economy over protecting those who are ‘not productive’ from the coronavirus. Then he faced America’s wrath.”
The report says of McMillan’s parents, “Scott’s father, Jim McMillan, is alive. He is 78. Scott’s mother, Gloria, is 75. They are well. They are, by Scott’s measure, not productive. Jim is a retired lawyer. Gloria is a retired high school English teacher.” As you can suspect from this passage, the article is especially careful to highlight that McMillan’s parents lead “not-productive” lives.
The attorney, who says he has received nine death threats for his tweet, apologizes for his since-deleted remarks, telling the Post, it “was probably insensitive to say it that way.”
“I know people are really scared,” McMillan, who took down his website and started screening his calls because of his tweet, told the Post, “and as an attorney, I know people can’t handle uncertainty. In retrospect, I understand people are in a vulnerable place, even if it is true that we can’t let our supply chain break.”
He adds, “Hey, sorry.”
After the report published, McMillan reappeared on Twitter to assure his followers that the Post reporter who interviewed him and his family was nothing but courteous and professional, adding that both he and his parents were happy to discuss the matter.
But whether the Post reporter was courteous or McMillan was happy to discuss the matter is not really the point. The point is that a senior Post editor and the people who are supposed to act as a safeguard against poor editorial decisions thought it would serve a public interest to call the parents of a 56-year-old man who got ratioed on Twitter for a bad take on the coronavirus. The point is that the Post believes hunting down obscure private citizens and their parents over bad tweets serves a journalistic purpose. It does not. That the people at the Post do not seem to see that is, frankly, disturbing.
Now if you will excuse me, I have some tweets to delete. I don’t want to get a confused phone call from my parents.
