Far be it from me to tell an institute of higher learning how to do its job, but it seems like an odd choice for New York University to hire partisan activists to mentor would-be reporters.
Then again, maybe that’s the point.
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Former Teen Vogue columnist Lauren Duca will teach at NYU’s Journalism school as a visiting scholar this coming semester. And one-time Media Matters staffer Talia Lavin, who resigned in disgrace from the New Yorker last year after she falsely accused a disabled veteran and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent of sporting a white supremacist tattoo, has been brought on as an adjunct professor, according to the Wrap.
The hires are interesting, to say the least.
For starters, Duca should not be anywhere near a supposedly serious journalism school. She is a snarling, dimwitted, egotistical pro-Democratic partisan who, with no prompting whatsoever, is prone to public pronouncements such as, “I just want the Evangelicals to know, if you guys figure out how to do ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ [in real life], I am fully prepared to bite some dicks off.”
Duca, whose real passion is showering Democratic candidates of marginal talent and appeal with undeserved adulation, has managed somehow to leverage a single piece of semi-competent political analysis and a combative appearance on Fox News into journalism stardom. For all I can tell, this is why she is now being rewarded with a class at NYU. Good on her for spinning nothing into something, but I’m not sure one interesting article and a television appearance qualifies anyone to teach a journalism course, even someone much brighter than Duca
Speaking of which, there’s the issue of the class itself. It is titled “The Feminist Journalist,” and it’s as terrible as it sounds, based on the syllabus. Duca has even assigned no fewer than two of her own stories as required reading for the course, in case you were wondering whether the author of the “Thigh-High Politics” column has any reservations about whether she is qualified to teach a course on journalism.
Then there’s Lavin, who is still best known for the time ICE publicly scolded her for falsely claiming one of its agents had a Nazi tattoo. She eventually quit her job at the New Yorker over the bogus assertion, for which she apologized profusely because, well, she had no excuse. Prior to being picked up by NYU, she hit rock bottom with her brief stint at the pro-Clinton watchdog group Media Matters.
Unlike Duca, Lavin’s class, titled “Reporting on the Far Right,” at least sounds interesting. Lavin, who NYU bills as an authority on “far-right extremism and social justice,” will teach a number of issues pertaining to her alleged area of expertise, including “the psychological impact of reporting on hate and the threats to physical safety and mental health that the beat represents.”
As interesting as all that sounds, it’s still not as interesting as NYU’s decision to hire two partisan activists to teach what are at least framed as serious courses in serious journalism.
