Tag Archives: #WashingtonPost

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Taylor Lorenz is just hopping mad!

Remember Taylor Lorenz? As we have noted previously, Miss Lorenz is The Washington Post author over whom the newspaper was paying owner Jeff Bezos’ hard earned dollars to Twitter to promote an article doxing a conservative on Twitter? The image to the right is a screen capture, but if you click on it, it will take you to the original tweet.

Miss Lorenz spent a lot of time investigating the Twitter account Libs of TikTok. LoTT’s schtick is to find the silliest things leftists put on the social media site Tik Tok, and snark them for sensible people on Twitter. Basically, LoTT is mocking people for their own exposed stupidity. My good friend Amanda Marcotte of Salon loved that LoTT was doxed, doubtlessly hoping that Chaya Raichik, a Brooklyn-based real estate salesperson and LoTT creator would lose her job, and her posting last April was a hope that Mr Musk’s buyout of Twitter results in the whole thing being killed.

Elon Musk is buying Twitter for a sum of money so large as to be meaningless to all normal people. That’s enraging many or most Twitter users, but it also feels appropriate. After all, that platform is largely controlled by trolls. So why shouldn’t one of the biggest trolls on the platform own it outright? It’s a little like Snoop Dogg buying Death Row Records. Of course, trolls never wrote “Gin and Juice.” They are just draining the life out of our democracy.

As I argued a couple weeks ago, when Musk first started making sounds about buying Twitter, his plan to let the already obnoxious troll problem spiral out of control will likely sound the death knell for the social media behemoth. Trolls are good for business on social media, up to a point. But if they take over too much, they run all the normal people off. Then the trolls leave too, because they’re hapless and forlorn without non-trolls to troll. Soon it’s just a ghost town, like Donald Trump’s utterly pointless platform Truth Social.

That’s rather amusing, given that Miss Marcotte had posted 22 separate Twitter threads dated April 25th through 10:40 AM on the 26th, to promote her own sites and writing.[1]Miss Marcotte has me blocked, but all I have to do is hit [Ctrl][Alt][N] and it takes me to the private browsing screen, in which I am not logged in on Twitter, and I can see what she has posted. She used her willingness to post profanity on the now-defunct website Pandagon to build an ‘edgy’ audience, so it’s difficult not to laugh at her calling other people trolls. It was just last Thursday that she complained that conservatives wanting to keep sexually loaded works out of school libraries means that they want to ban and burn books.

LOL!

Well, Miss Lorenz was not very concerned about other people’s privacy, or potential harm to them, when she doxxed Miss Raichik, but she certainly is concerned about potential risks to herself! Very, very concerned about the new guidance from the Centers for Disease Control over COVID-19, which basically says that there’s no need for serious restrictions, Miss Lorenz tweeted:

Miss Lorenz is, herself, immunocompromised. She wrote:

Disabled/medically vulnerable ppl shouldn’t have to risk their lives to participate in society, nor are most even given that choice. Disabled people also have to work, go to school, grocery shop, go to the doctor’s office. We are human beings in the world just like everyone else. As someone working in media who’s immunocompromised and medically vulnerable I really wish we as an industry hired more disabled writers and did more to center vulnerable people in our coverage, esp on COVID. What’s happening right now is so horrific on such a massive scale

I would point out here that the CDC are not run by evil reich-wing Republicans, but that the current administration is under all sweetness-and-light liberal Joe Biden. She did note that, sort of, when she said that such a view is “championed by liberals and large media institutions.” The truth is simple: even if the left were not as tired of silly mask rules — and we did note how Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney is firing the last vaccine holdouts, even though the vaccines neither prevent people from contracting SARS-CoV-2 nor transmitting it to others — as are conservatives, there’s an election coming up in 12 weeks, and the Democrats are doing everything that they can to cut their anticipated losses.

I do not want Miss Lorenz to contract the virus, but the fact is that almost everybody eventually will. Realistically, I can more reasonably hope that when Miss Lorenz contracts it — if she hasn’t already — her symptoms will be very mild or even non-existent. But her fears are not enough to override the desires of the vast majority of people in this country, people who have long ago thrown away their silly masks.

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↑1 Miss Marcotte has me blocked, but all I have to do is hit [Ctrl][Alt][N] and it takes me to the private browsing screen, in which I am not logged in on Twitter, and I can see what she has posted.
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The Department of Fatherland Security ‘pauses’ creation of the Ministry of Truth The Washington Post's Taylor Lorenz is aghast!

If you hold your cursor over the page tab on an article, you can see the original title from when the article was first saved. The tab on The Washington Post article below shows that it was originally entitled “Disinformation Governance Board ‘paused’ after just 3 weeks”. Look at it now, once the Post’s editors got hold of it, and screen captured the original, reproduced at the left, for documentation. You can click on it to enlarge the image.

How the Biden administration let right-wing attacks derail its disinformation efforts

A ‘pause’ of the Department of Homeland Security’s newly created board comes after its head, Nina Jankowicz, was the victim of coordinated online attacks as the administration struggled to respond

By Taylor Lorenz | Wednesday, May 18, 2022 | 10:28 AM EDT

On the morning of April 27, the Department of Homeland Security announced the creation of the first Disinformation Governance Board with the stated goal to “coordinate countering misinformation related to homeland security.” The Biden administration tapped Nina Jankowicz, a well-known figure in the field of fighting disinformation and extremism, as the board’s executive director.

So, who is Taylor Lorenz? Miss Lorenz was most recently famous for her investigation and doxing of Chaya Raichik, a Brooklyn-based real estate saleswoman and creator of the Twitter site that the left hate, Libs of TikTok. Miss Lorenz’s article was, to put it mildly, harsh. Continue reading →

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Heather Long gets a promotion

Heather Long first came to my attention when she was an economics reporter for CNN. She wrote, on September 16, 2016:

Problem: Most Americans don’t believe the unemployment rate is 5%

by Heather Long | September 6, 2016 | 3:18 PM EDT

Heather Long

Americans think the economy is in far worse shape than it is.The U.S. unemployment rate is only 4.9%, but 57% of Americans believe it’s a lot higher than that, according to a new survey by the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University.

The general public has “extremely little factual knowledge” about the job market and labor force, Rutgers found.

It’s another example of how experts on Wall Street and in Washington see the economy differently than the regular Joe. Many of the nation’s top economic experts say that America is “near full employment.” The unemployment rate has actually been at or below 5% for almost a year — millions of people have found jobs in what is the best period of hiring since the late 1990s.

But regular people appear to have their doubts about how healthy America’s employment picture is. Nearly a third of those survey by Rutgers believe unemployment is actually at 9%, or higher.

Republican candidate Donald Trump has tapped into this confusion. He has repeatedly called the official unemployment rate a “joke” and a even “hoax.”

There’s more at the original.

I noted, at the time — in a post that is locked up, with so many others, in a file that’s stuck in my server somewhere when I got this site ‘fixed’ from some real technical problems — that what Americans believed, that unemployment was “actually at 9%, or higher,” was correct, if you looked at U-6 rather than the ‘official’ U-3 unemployment rate.

    • U-1: Persons unemployed 15 weeks or longer, as a percent of the civilian labor force
    • U-2: Job losers and persons who completed temporary jobs, as a percent of the civilian labor force
    • U-3: U-3 Total unemployed, as a percent of the civilian labor force (official unemployment rate)
    • U-4: Total unemployed plus discouraged workers, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus discouraged workers
    • U-5: Total unemployed, plus discouraged workers, plus all other persons marginally attached to the labor force, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force
    • U-6: Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force.

NOTE: Persons marginally attached to the labor force are those who currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the past 12 months. Discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally attached, have given a job-market related reason for not currently looking for work. Persons employed part time for economic reasons are those who want and are available for full-time work but have had to settle for a part-time schedule.

The August, 2016 U-6 rate was 9.6%, which I said was right in line with American’s perception of it. Interestingly enough, with the current ‘official” unemployment rate of 4.8%, U-6 currently stands at 8.5%, while we have employers going begging for workers.

As it happened, Miss Long followed me on Twitter not due to any of my brilliant economic articles, but because I responded to one of her sunset over Manhattan Twitter photos with one of sunset between the olive trees in Tuscany. Hey, I’ll take that.

Search and rescue volunteer, Nate Lair, drives a boat through downtown Beattyville after heavy rains led to the Kentucky River flooding the town and breaking records last set in 1957. March 1, 2021
Alton Strupp / Louisville Courier-Journal

In February of 2017, while still with CNN, Miss Long wrote a series about Beattyville, Kentucky, a place called the “poorest white town in America” from 2008 to 2012. While I don’t live in Beattyville, I do live in the next county over, and my nephew, Nate Lair, lives outside the town and is a volunteer fireman and rescue worker there.

I did get some photos of the Beattyville Wooly Worm Festival last Saturday!

My younger daughter wanted me to get the baby goat. I didn’t.

But I digress.

One of the things I really liked about Miss Long was that, in reading her articles, I couldn’t tell what her political positions were. From a few of her tweets concerning the Defiant Girl statue, facing down the bull on Wall Street, I could tell that she was a strong supporter of more women moving into the financial and technical fields, but whether she is a Democrat or Republican (or independent), liberal or moderate or conservative, I really do not know. To me, that’s the mark of a good journalist, as opposed to journolist.[1]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading

That’s about to change:

    Heather Long to join Washington Post Opinions as editorial writer and columnist

    By WashPostPR | Monday, October 25, 2021 | 12:10 PM EDT

    Announcement from Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt, Deputy Editorial Page Editors Karen Tumulty and Ruth Marcus, and Manager of Editorial Talent and Logistics Nana Efua Mumford:

    We are delighted to announce that Heather Long will be joining the Opinions section as an editorial writer and columnist, focusing on economic policy, the future of work and other topics. This is something of a homecoming for Heather, who was deputy editorial page editor of The Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pa., when the paper won a 2012 Pulitzer Prize for writing about the Penn State/Sandusky child abuse scandal.

    Since joining The Post in 2017, Heather has reported and written brilliantly on how economic trends and policies — and more recently, a pandemic — affect real people across the country. In 2020, she helped coin the “K-Shaped Recovery,” and in 2021, she recognized the “Great Reassessment of Work” taking place as the deep psychological impact of the pandemic caused people to quit jobs, retire early and seek something very different in their careers. She has won two SABEW “Best in Business” awards and twice been a finalist for the Gerald Loeb Award for breaking news.

    As a member of the Post editorial board, Heather will become the lead writer on economics, business, inequality, labor and related issues, taking the place of Charles Lane, who assumed chief foreign-policy duties when Jackson Diehl retired in August. On our op-ed page, she will join Catherine Rampell (recent winner of first prize in commentary in the Online News Association awards), Megan McArdle and Helaine Olen to comprise one of the liveliest economic teams anywhere. In time we hope to take full advantage of Heather’s proven broadcasting skills as well.

    Heather grew up in Virginia and Pennsylvania, graduated summa cum laude in Economics and English from Wellesley College, earned two Master’s degrees as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and worked at an investment firm for a couple of years before joining the Patriot-News from 2009 to 2012. She was an opinion editor and columnist for The Guardian in 2013-2014 and senior reporter and editor for CNN from 2014-2017.

    Heather is finishing some reporting projects and hopes to join us Dec. 1.

And thus I will be able to discern whether Miss Long is a liberal or conservative, and how close to the ends of that spectrum she is. But even if it turns out that her political views are rather far from mine, knowing that she actually understands business and economics, will have me continuing to pay attention to what she writes. My congratulations to her.

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↑1 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.